Why retaining one CRO partner during all phases of clinical development drives better outcomes

The journey from non-clinical and early phase research to market entry is complex and filled with challenges. To navigate this environment, companies must focus on maintaining a clear strategy that mitigates, to the extent possible, the risks and challenges. Retaining a single CRO partner throughout the entire lifecycle of a compound or device development provides the consistency needed to overcome these obstacles and achieve development goals.

Switching Clinical Research Organisations (CROs) during the development process may seem like a viable option for reasons such as cost saving or specialized services. However, this decision often introduces more hurdles than it pertains to resolve.

Retaining a single CRO partner throughout the product development cycle and through the different types and phases of clinical studies allows the involved team to build a deep understanding of the product and its unique characteristics, enabling anticipation of potential obstacles and allowing knowledge obtained from previous solutions to be applied for mitigating new challenges.

Moreover, the CRO partner team will become a true extension of the sponsors team, allowing seamless collaboration including full understanding of preferred ways of working together.

In addition, operational inefficiencies of switching CROs can be significant and can have the undesirable impact of decreased quality, extended timelines and escalated costs. Transferring knowledge to another partner – with the risk of it being incomplete, negotiating contractual terms between the Sponsor and the new CRO, retraining new teams, and aligning them with the established processes, all require substantial time and effort, often leading to delays, miscommunication, and increased costs.

Additionally, inconsistencies in trial designs, data collection, and reporting resulting from a change in CROs may compromise regulatory compliance and delay critical approvals.

Thus, in a competitive industry where every day counts in getting new products to market, it is advantageous to reduce these risks by finding a full service CRO that has the capabilities, a partnership collaboration model and can deploy its services during the entire development cycle.