"The market for CROs has never been better," said Joe Herring, Covance's CEO at the conference.
"The global spend on R&D by pharmaceutical and biotech companies represents $60bn (€46bn) each year; and 24 per cent of it is outsourced to CROs like Covance."
He explained during the event held in San Francisco that the main driver of this success is that pharma companies are increasingly finding more cost effective and faster to outsource to CROs.
With now 10 per cent of the market share, Covance has not hesitated to take advantage of that trend and is now undoubtedly one of the leaders in the market place. The company attributes its achievement to the fact that it has managed to differentiate itself from its competitors.
"We are the only CRO with substantial footprints both in preclinical as well as clinical development," said Herring.
"Another key differentiating factor about our company is that we are two thirds laboratory-based."
A substantial advantage indeed considering that 75 per cent of the key regulatory milestones data in Investigational New Drugs (IND) and new drug applications (RDA) is laboratory-based.
Covance believes that controlling that laboratory data to give faster, cheaper and high quality data for its clients gives it a strong platform to help them speed their drug to market.
But the sky has not always been so bright for the industry. Over that last year, there has been concerns about the CRO sector mainly because R&D growth had somewhat slowed down.
"But it has picked back up and the first quarter of 2007 has been the highest rate of R&D spending since the first quarter in 2003," said Herring.
He explained that the CROs have managed to develop more business, despite R&D spending just ticking over, for several reasons including the continuous high level of outsourcing usage from biotech companies.
"Biologicals represent 50 per cent of all drugs in development so that has been a very good outcome for the CRO industry," explained Herring.
He also stressed that despite lower spending on research, pharma companies are outsourcing more simply because they increasingly realise that it is in their best interest.
Covance said that one of the biggest changes it has made in its preclinical business and that has allowed it to gain market shares is its deep portfolio across early development up until proof of concept.
The company claims that it can conduct first-time-in-animal trials to first-time-in-human studies in an average of 24 weeks, which represents a speed twice as fast as large pharma companies can do if they conduct the trials in-house.
From a preclinical point of view, one of the main prides of Covance is also its study tracker which the company said it is the most widely utilised instrument within the industry to access toxicology and chemistry data in real time.
"Take the example where there is a big safety concern in the Phase III clinical trial of a drug and the head of R&D calls and says he needs to know what the toxicology data said in the study five years ago; if that study was done by Covance with its study tracker, we can look at what the toxicology finding were, from anywhere around the world, 24 hours a day," said Herring to illustrate the potential of the service.
"It is definitely better than having to go through archives in an offsite facility."
But the preclinical business is not the only place where Covance has been investing time and money. The second part of early development - clinical pharmacology - is an area where the company has devoted a high amount of resources.
The firm now has 11 Phase I clinics and 550 beds, one of the largest first-in-human study capacity.
And with a sector growth which shows no sign of slowing down, Covance is confident that its company will benefit from this success after having tripled its revenue over the last 10 years.