Champaign man opens drug-testing facility in Indianapolis

CHAMPAIGN – After a career as a regional research manager for Eli Lilly & Co., Champaign resident Mike Smiricky considered himself "too young to retire."

So Smiricky, who retired from Lilly four years ago, went back into business. In league with another former Lilly employee, William McGinnis, he opened a clinical research facility in Indianapolis last year.

Now they're doing clinical testing for pharmaceutical companies, doing early stage testing on drugs before they hit the market.

So far, they've launched five trials, including two for diabetic medications and one for medication for pain associated with shingles. They're also involved in trials focused on people with different levels of kidney and liver function.

"It's something I dearly love," Smiricky said of the work. "I invested a lot of years at Lilly in research."

Smiricky said he's working with 12 companies on other possible projects, and it looks as though Centurion Clinical Research – the contract research organization that he and McGinnis founded – may expand beyond Indianapolis.

"We're looking at putting a unit in Chicago next," said Smiricky, Centurion's president.

Smiricky – who has training as a pharmacist and chemist and has master's degrees in both health care administration and business administration – formerly managed and monitored research-trial sites in Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

He chose Champaign as his home base, partly because his wife's family was from the Rantoul area.

McGinnis, Centurion's chief executive officer, left Lilly five years before Smiricky did and started several biotech companies in Canada and the United States.

Last year, with help from investors, they leased a former doctor's office building across from St. Vincent's Hospital on the north side of Indianapolis.

They assembled a 40-person staff – 18 full-time and 22 part-time employees, including nurses, phlebotomists, lab technicians and a chief medical officer, among others.

Centurion does Phase I and Phase II testing of drugs, looking primarily at how the drugs are metabolized in the body.

"The trials tend to be small, 20 to 50 patients at the most," Smiricky said.

The unit has overnight accommodations for participants in testing, and they have to stay there until the medication is flushed from their system.

To operate the research site, Centurion needed the cooperation of physicians in the Indianapolis area and patients involved in clinical research.

It's not always easy to find trial participants, Smiricky said.

"It's a challenge," he said. "You have to have a recruiter and (participants) who understand what the process is. In some cases, they've had a family member who had the disease, and they want to provide quality information to get a cure or treatment."

Sometimes, people participate in clinical testing for financial reasons. That's what Smiricky did when he was in pharmacy school, to help pay for tuition.

Participation also requires a time commitment.

"You're sequestered for the entire trial," Smiricky said. "It could be two or three nights up to a week. There have been trials up to a month."

What patients get for their efforts is a full medical history and a physical exam. In some cases, the research sponsor pays a stipend – from $500 to $2,000, based on the length of trial and the difficulty in recruiting specific types of patients.

Test participants get their meals and lodging furnished. They can't have visitors during their stay, but they have access to computers with Internet access, TVs, DVD players, books, magazines and a pool table.

"Participants have to be fully notified of the risks and benefits of the trial," Smiricky said. But they often aren't supplied with the results of the research, because that's the intellectual property of the company.

Smiricky said the recession hasn't hurt his business.

"If anything, it might even help us," he said. "More and more people are without health care coverage. We can't offer them medical care, but we can offer them information they can take to a physician if they want to do that. But we can't offer (medical) recommendations."

Those interested in taking part in clinical trials can contact Centurion's recruiting group, 317-532-1823, or check Centurion's Web site, www.centurionclinicalresearch.com, for a list of trials for which participants are being recruited, as well as an online registration form.

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