"We are essentially looking for an organisation with revenues of up to $50m, preferably having a footprint both in the early and advanced stages of clinical research," K.V. Subramaniam, president and CEO of RLS, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com.
He added that RLS expects the new company to have a presence in US and EU markets to allow it to conduct multi-centric clinical trials, "empowering its delivery capabilities from India".
Over the last two years, RLS has been doing clinical studies for clients from Europe, the US and Japan.
"These studies range from pre-clinical to Phase IV, through data management and biostatistics," said Subramaniam.
RLS recently expanded its clinical research services to the US by setting up a new subsidiary in Delaware.
"We have been seeing a significant accretion of clinical trial contracts, since we established our US office," said Subramaniam.
The new US entity is now RLS' headquarters in the US, where half of the company's business comes from.
The Indian clinical trials arena is starting to boom as skyrocketing costs of R&D have spurred many pharma companies to offshore clinical trials to low-cost countries.
A recent report by analysts at McKinsey estimated that clinical research in the country will be a $1bn (€800,000m) industry by 2010, although some analysts have been more conservative than this.
But a new trend has been growing in the past two years, with Indian companies looking at buying in Western markets, as they look to increase their business.
Jubilant Organosys was the first ever Indian company to buy US CRO when it announced the acquisition of Target Research Associates in 2005.