Benefits

The pharmaceutical industry is changing, and the clinical trials market must follow suit.

  • Patent protection for many drugs is coming to an end.
  • Companies are under extreme pressure to boost pipelines in order to keep pace with rivals in the race for scale.
  • The average cost of bringing a new active substance to market sits at around $1 billion per compound - and is increasing, whilst the number of new active substances is decreasing.
  • Pipelines are not growing and the output of marketed new active substances is static.
  • Total development times to launch have increased, thus eroding the length of patent protected marketing time resulting in lost sales income of tens of millions of dollars.

Patient recruitment is clearly essential when conducting a successful trial. Despite this fact, combined with the extreme pressures placed on trials, and the need for change, the traditional recruitment methods for clinical trials have remained virtually identical for the last 40 years.

  • Over 90 per cent of later stage clinical trials are still carried out by individual primary care physicians and hospital consultants who recruit, on average, five patients each.
  • Pharma companies spend millions of dollars on opening investigative sites that never recruit a single patient.

This method and the associated wastage represent the biggest flaw in the traditional method and requires a huge number of health professionals to recruit the required number of patients. The method requires appropriate investigators who have the time and inclination to educate the patient to ensure they fully understand the process and the importance of remaining on the trial. It also doesn't take into account the changing landscape, which has seen patients take a more pro-active approach to their own health.

The Synexus model is different and can expedite the recruitment process through the provision of one management point, attention focussed solely on the task at hand and the use of pro-active and country specific recruitment tools.

Patient recruitment and retention