India's first patient recruitment SMO up and running
patient-recruitment site management organisation (SMO) in India to
cash in on India's burgeoning clinical research market.
The company, the largest patient recruitment organisation in Europe, has achieved this through its strategic alliance with IRL, a subsidiary of the Indian Clinical Research Institute, formed earlier this month.
IRL-Synexus will establish a chain of fully owned good clinical practice (GCP)-compliant clinical research centres across India, and the first of which has now been opened in Mumbai. All patients will be recruited through internationally accepted methods and the first patient is expected to be recruited to a trial in the first three months of 2006, said the company.
India's clinical research industry is currently valued at $100 million (€83 million) and is almost doubling each year, reflecting the shifting focus of the clinical outsourcing industry to Asia.
India's value in clinical research is compelling for many reasons, including significantly lower costs of conducting trials and a large patient population that are treatment naive and thus ideal candidates for clinical trials.
"India possesses tremendous potential to become a preferred location for research and development for the global biotechnology and pharmaceutical sector," Said Dr Ian Smith, medical director of >Synexus.
The IRL-Synexus alliance is the first move in the company's new strategy of replicating its UK operations through acquisitions and partnerships across a range of countries important to its clients for running clinical trials.
