Contract Research Organization Services MarketSize and Trends

The contract research organization services are the organizations that provide support to the biopharmaceutical or biotechnological industries and academic institutes in the form of outsourced pharmaceutical research services. The CROs work for both drugs and medical devices and also range from large, international full service organizations to small niche specialty groups to fulfill the clients’ requirement. Initially, the pharmaceutical companies used to carry their own discovery work, along with every other elements to get the drug or medical device in the market. But nowadays, any research work required by biotechnology or pharmaceutical companies from designing assay to planning and running the clinical trials are outsourced from CROs. Outsourcing or partnering with a CROs by the biotechnological companies provide a strategic benefit to the manufacturers, such as cost and time saving in the development and approval process of new drug or therapeutic device, which is expected to increase the demand for CROs.

Furthermore, increasing demand for effective biotherapies and increasing competition between manufacturers to discover new drugs are expected to foster growth of CROs market. Increasing need for product development is leading to high demand for experience and high skilled professionals to implement and conduct the biotechnological research and clinical trials, which can be provided by CROs.

Market Trends

Increasing number of Food and Drug administration (FDA) approvals are supporting the growth of biopharma industry, which in turn is fuelling growth of the CROs market. According to article published in Nature, the U.S. FDA approved 46 novel drugs for various indication by the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) in 2017 and 22 drugs in 2016. As the drug companies and few research institutes face challenges in marketing their product due to limited resources and huge capital investment, which decreases the affordability of errors in research work. Therefore CROs play an important role in reducing the cost of research and help in successful clinical development program, which is the most important step of drug development process. As developing a safe and efficacious biological product for human is demonstrated through clinical trials.

Furthermore, stringent regulatory policies for drug development make process more complex, as it required more resources to develop new drugs, devices, and biologics. These process requires expertise in broad scientific disciplines of preclinical, clinical, ancillary clinical in chemistry, packaging, manufacturing, project management, and regulatory affairs which are provided by the CRO’s, considered as a major reason for drug companies to outsource clinical trials to CROs. Besides, the pharmaceuticals & biopharmaceutical companies are collaborating to undergo clinical trials with CROs to undergo the drug development process.