Understanding The Continuum Of Clinical Collaboration

By Mark Scullion, Senior Vice President, Global Alliance Management, Syneos

As biopharmaceutical companies evaluate strategies to advance their products to market, they are increasingly doing so with new options for partnership. Contract Research Organization (CRO) or vendor partners are invited to solve challenges of capacity, quality, expertise and infrastructure – but not necessarily all at the same time. For one clinical team, short-term monitoring capacity in Asia is needed where the group has none; for another, in an established geography, more medical expertise in a newly-acquired therapy area will improve critical site relationships; in a third part of the same organization, drug safety leaders tackle fluctuating volumes that stress their ability to remain compliant. All of this under corporate pressure to raise research productivity without sacrificing quality.

Different challenges require different approaches, including different models and different partners. This is not new. Many Sponsor companies are employing a mixed-model strategy in which a functional service provider (FSP) exists alongside traditional project-based outsourcing or programmatic preferred providers.

One of the key trends of the last decade has been the consolidation of vendors, reducing the length of the right-tail distribution and increasing the concentration of work done by a smaller number of larger companies. Niche services remain critical, but taken as a whole fewer vendors perform a larger share of the outsourced work. That means that vendor-selection processes tilt toward finding as broad and deep a fit as possible, the better to capture the efficiencies from scale and repeatability that those moves are intended to deliver. It results in a “model of best fit” approach, which serves the greatest volume of need to the greatest possible extent.