Over the years, we’ve gotten to know folks working in a spectrum of biopharma organizations – from large and well-established biopharma corporations, to virtual, often asset-centric companies. Despite their differences, it turns out that all types of companies may outsource some or all of their preclinical R&D – but for very different reasons, ranging from internal capacity constraints to, well, not having a wet lab at all.
Wanting to understand more about the different motivations behind outsourcing preclinical research, we’ve created a brief survey that we would be thrilled to have you participate in. Particularly if your company outsources (or plans to) relatively early research activities, such as
{This survey is now closed. Thanks for your responses!} | You may ask, “isn’t this information already out there?” If you know where we can find it, drop us a line! In our own research on the subject, we find that the early-stage outsourcing is not well-analyzed.
For example, a 2011 Tufts CSDD study on contract research organizations (CROs) did include an “Applied Research” category(1). However, Applied Research is still fairly broad, encompassing everything from Proteomics to pharmacokinetics to lead optimization. And for the purposes of this survey, we're not interested in many of these activities, and also not ADME, toxicity, bioanalytical stuff, etc.
Notwithstanding that we occasionally hear about early preclinical partnerships - for example, Debiopharm Group's recently announced partnership with preclinical CRO Cenix BioScience to discover biomarkers that aim to enhance personalized medicine - this sector of contract research providers is smaller than the clinical CROs, and many of them (over 80%, according to Tufts CSDD) are privately held, which means information is hard to come by.
(1) Results of the Tufts study were summarized by Getz et al. in Contract Pharma ("Resizing the Global Contract R&D Services Market: A new study revises estimates of the market." Published May 30, 2012.) See more at: http://www.contractpharma.com/issues/2012-06/view_features/resizing-the-global-contract-rd-services-market/
| Got two minutes?
Why not use them to complete our survey? Once you do, you’ll have a chance to win a gift certificate to an organization near and dear to our hearts, Better World Books. Besides being a great source of new and used books, BWB has raised millions of dollars for literacy and saved millions of books from landfills. So come on over and take our survey - and start thinking about what summer reading you may be spending your prize on!
(And if you've already have taken the survey - thanks!)
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