The Prudentas deal, which is being carried out through ChemDiv’s local ChemRar High Tech Centre unit, adds clinical development capacity to ChemRar’s existing early stage genomic discovery offering.
Nikolay Savchuk, ChemDiv’s CEO, said the trend to conduct trials in Eastern Europe is “based on the availability of [treatment] naive patient populations, rapid and efficient trial recruitment and high data quality across a broad range of therapeutic indications.”
Savchuk added the acquisition “will help us bring unique levels of clinical development productivity to pharma and biotech partners through risk mitigation, cost- and time savings.”
Dmitry Prudnikov, who will remain as CEO of Prudentas, said that: “integration with ChemDiv will allow our clients to get unique opportunity in studying their compounds with us from pre-clinical testing to proof-of-concept trials.”
Global pharmaceutical industry demand for low-cost clinical research has seen the number of trials being conducted in developing economies increase rapidly in recent years.
One of the major factors driving this growth is the ease of recruiting subjects for clinical trials in developing countries compared with in more affluent western countries where firms often struggle to find participants.
A recent survey by RNCOS suggested one reason for this is the high cost of drugs in developing regions relative to income. The analysts explained that for many people in poorer countries the only way of accessing drugs is via participation in clinical trials.
While India and China were the first to benefit from this demand, concerns about the transferability of data between ethnic groups, raised most recently by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA), has driven the growth of the European trial sector.
Although only at the preliminary stages, the EMEA’s work on transferability has seen demand for trials in market-relevant populations intensify. As a result, CROs have begun focusing on the region as a key emerging market.
In the last few months for example, contract research groups such as Covance, PPD and Synexus have all expanded operations in central and Eastern Europe though various deals and acquisitions.