Traditionally, large biopharmaceutical companies have outsourced clinical study responsibilities to a wide variety of external vendors, distributing the work across many service providers. For their part, large CROs have routinely provided services to both large and small biopharmaceutical companies to keep their top-notch resources utilized to capacity and add to their bottom line.
Over the past several years, large sponsors and CROs have been trading in these transactional, fee-for-service business relationships for longer-term, tightly-integrated strategic partnerships. And the trend is only accelerating.
