Clinical Research Organization

The most important single attribute holding an advantage for Big Pharma over Biotech is the internal expertise in clinical development. Expertise here is much harder to come by than in preclinical development. How many people in the world have developed a new antipsychotic The clinical research organizations (CROs) may be a welcome help to Biotech, but experience shows that CROs will only do as good a job as your internal expertise can force them to do. The same CRO may do a lot better job for, say, Pfizer than for a Biotech on the same kind of trial. It will be more stringent as to which patients they admit to the trial and which clinical centers they use. On paper, it may seem equal, but it is only equal in the same way that all public schools are equal. 

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