CRO globalisation the “pipeline saviour”?

Over on the Blogging Biotech blog, Mary Canady has written about the globalisation of the CRO sector and how this could work for the benefit of pharma and biotech pipelines. She makes some interesting points, but a more efficient clinical research sector also has some long-term implications for drug discovery.

Why not head over there now and see what you think?

My comment was: “The importance of CROs having global reach while maintaining close links with pharma HQs has been great for the extablised players, who have gradually moved into Eastern Europe, India etc over the past 5-10 years. This hasn’t been lost on the new generation of local CROs springing up in these regions, which had their initial growth from subcontracting from global CROs but are now emerging from their own countries and merging with other small/medium CROs from other countries (including developed countries) in an attempt to take on the big players at their own game of “global reach, local touch”.

“The upshot of this will certainly be cost-containment for pharma, but the big question is how much of this will get reinvested into smarter drug discovery and earlier, more demanding go/no-go questions being asked of compounds, and more efficient scientific and operational models for how the clinical programme is conducted.

“The even bigger question is whether having a clinical research operation that is more efficient at weeding out compounds that don’t meet the (more exacting) modern standards for safety and efficacy will improve or actually damage the size of the pipeline. You’ve got to have good compounds going into testing to be able to withstand the attrition that a good clinical research operating is always going to deliver…”