CRO woes: are companies better off using in-house resources?

In this week's Expert View piece, Laurie Halloran, founder and chief executive of the Halloran Consulting Group, considers the changing role of contract research organizations in the discovery and development of new pharmaceuticals.

A decade ago, experts were predicting further integration of contract research organizations (CROs) in clinical trials.

And for the most part, they were right. What used to be a vertical, top-down, fixed reporting model industry swiftly shifted to a mixed model utilizing both internal and external resources to conduct clinical trials. But as companies steadily increased their dependence on outside resources, cracks in the system started to show. In recent years, companies have examined the amount of effort and resources it takes to oversee these external resources, as well as the quality of work and the cost associated with them, and the results were not pretty. This has led some of the most “innovative” companies to rethink their outsourcing models altogether. They are bringing certain functions back inhouse to reduce the amount of work out-sourced throughout all phases of clinical trials, from conception to completion.