If you want to improve the success rate of your clinical trial, choosing the “right” Contract Research Organization (CRO) is critical. Several factors go into making this decision - from the experience and expertise of the CRO to their ability to meet your specific needs. In this blog post, we'll take a closer look at some of the most important considerations you should keep in mind when choosing a CRO and why finding the right fit can make all the difference in ensuring a successful clinical trial.
4 Benefits of Finding the Right CRO
The right CRO complements your strengths and fills in the gaps of your organization’s expertise. They add invaluable capacity, while allowing you cost flexibility. To the extent that a full service CRO is right for you, they can provide you with a wide range of services, including finding and vetting qualified vendors.
By working with a CRO, you can focus on the core aspects of your clinical trial while ensuring that you get the best possible support and service from your vendors.
1) Expanded Capacity and Expertise
When able, try to work with a CRO that has experience relevant to specific characteristics of your trial - demographic being studied, the technology of the trial, the disease being studied, etc. This way, even if it’s your first clinical trial, you can lean on their experience to drive clinical success and avoid costly mistakes.
A strong CRO can also provide you with access to their extensive network of contacts in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, which can be instrumental in helping your drug development efforts.
2) Immediate Access to Patients & Trail Participants
A great CRO fit has the ability to provide a wide variety of clinical trial patients/participants for your clinical study. Discuss the CRO’s pre-screen process to ensure that you’re enrolling the best possible candidates, which will help you avoid delays in the study due to patient recruitment. Understand how they meet and monitor enrollment goals and their systems for enhanced patient engagement.
3) Help You Manage Your Budget
A Contract Research Organization can help you stay within your budget by providing accurate cost estimates up-front. This can also help you avoid spending more money than you intended, which can be especially helpful if you are on a tight budget.
Additionally, a Contract Research Organization can help you speed up the research and development process by providing access to their extensive networks of experts and resources, which can help you further manage your costs.
4) Access Leading Edge Technology
Regardless of your CRO selection criteria, your final choice needs to be digitally enabled. In this day and age it is probably impossible to overstate the importance of engaging a “Digital-First” CRO.
A strong digital toolset will help your CRO:
Improve information security, control, and access
Increase process efficiency and speed
Improve profitability
Mitigate risk across the entire ecosystem of the trial
Facilitate stronger collaboration between EOCs, DMCs, DSMBs, SRCs, Ad Boards
Time is money in clinical trials. A week delay can cost in excess of $100,000 trial expenses. On the other side of the ledger, delayed time to market can cost $100,000 a week of lost revenue. Revenue aside, the benefits to getting life changing treatments to market faster is priceless from the standpoint of patients and their families.
From a patient safety perspective, strong digital capabilities lead to greater process consistency and communications, both of which contribute to enhanced safety and security. Understand your CROs full suite of digital capabilities and how they will enhance your study.