BERRY CONSULTANTS LLP

Their core work

Berry Consultants is a specialist statistical consulting firm best known for Bayesian adaptive methods and platform trial design in clinical research. In H2020, they contributed statistical expertise to EU-PEARL, a multi-disease platform trial infrastructure covering conditions ranging from major depressive disorder to tuberculosis and neurofibromatosis. They also brought health economics and diagnostic value modelling to VALUE-Dx, which assessed whether better diagnostics can reduce unnecessary antibiotic prescribing. Their practical value in a consortium is the ability to design, run, and defend statistically rigorous adaptive trials — a capability most research teams lack in-house.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Both H2020 projects launched in 2019, so the keyword split does not reflect true temporal change — it reflects two parallel workstreams rather than a shift over time. That said, the two projects reveal a firm operating at opposite ends of the clinical research cycle: upstream diagnostic economics (VALUE-Dx) and downstream trial execution methodology (EU-PEARL). If there is a directional signal, it points toward platform trial infrastructure and Bayesian methodology as the higher-value, more technically distinctive lane — EU-PEARL received nearly three times the EC funding of VALUE-Dx.

Berry Consultants appears to be positioning toward complex adaptive and platform trial methodology, where Bayesian expertise is a genuine differentiator — a direction that aligns with growing EU and industry demand for more efficient trial designs.

How they like to work

Berry Consultants has participated exclusively as a consortium partner, never as a project coordinator — consistent with a specialist consultancy that joins large projects to provide a specific technical function rather than to lead. Both their projects sit in large, multi-partner consortia: EU-PEARL alone involves dozens of academic hospitals, pharma companies, and patient organisations. With 64 unique partners across 16 countries from just 2 projects, they clearly integrate into complex multi-stakeholder structures without difficulty.

Despite only two projects, Berry Consultants has touched 64 unique consortium partners across 16 countries — a footprint that reflects participation in large, pan-European clinical trial networks. Their reach is European in scope with no visible geographic concentration.

What sets them apart

Berry Consultants occupies a narrow but high-demand niche: Bayesian statistics applied to adaptive and platform trial design. This is genuinely rare among EU project participants — most statistical contributions to health projects come from university biostatistics departments, not specialist commercial firms with operational trial experience. For a consortium building a complex adaptive or platform trial, they bring both methodological credibility and practical execution capability that academic partners typically cannot match.

Highlights from their portfolio

• EU-PEARL
  The project's largest funding award (EUR 196,250) and its scope — a multi-disease platform trial spanning depression, tuberculosis, neurofibromatosis, and NASH — makes it a flagship example of Berry's Bayesian platform trial expertise in action.
• VALUE-Dx
  Demonstrates a complementary capability in health economics and AMR policy analysis, showing Berry can contribute beyond pure trial statistics to the upstream question of diagnostic value and antibiotic stewardship.