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What drives site performance in clinical trials?

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery volume 17, pages 389–390 (2018)Cite this article

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Analysis

Ten major biopharma companies submitted detailed performance data on every clinical site active during their recent phase I, II and III trials. The participating companies ranged in market capitalization from US$25 billion to more than $150 billion, and all had annual R&D expenditures of over $1.5 billion. The resulting data set consists of more than 75,000 site records spanning all diseases and regions. To strengthen the data set, we incorporated selected information from KMR Group's proprietary Site Metrix database, which includes performance data from over 600,000 recent global site records from 35 biopharma companies. We also gathered qualitative information from over 70 interviews and targeted survey queries of sponsors, sites and contract research organizations (CROs). Interviews covered the site value chain, addressing processes such as site identification and feasibility assessment, contracting and budget negotiation, site resourcing and training, study conduct, site close-out and investigator payments (see Supplementary Box 1 for details of the data set and analysis).

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the contribution of P. Lugan.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Boston Consulting Group, Boston, MA, USA

    Brendan Smith, Maria Denslow, Valery Panier & Michael S. Ringel

  2. KMR Group, Chicago, IL, USA

    Linda Martin, Scott Martin, Melissa Hutchens & Conrad Hawkins

Authors
  1. Brendan Smith
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  2. Linda Martin
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  3. Scott Martin
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  4. Maria Denslow
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  5. Melissa Hutchens
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  6. Conrad Hawkins
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  7. Valery Panier
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  8. Michael S. Ringel
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Linda Martin or Michael S. Ringel.

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Competing interests

Some of the authors of this article are employees of The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a management consultancy that works with the world's leading biopharmaceutical companies. The research for this article was funded in part by BCG's Health Care practice area.

Supplementary information

Supplementary information Box S1

Details of the dataset and analysis methodology (PDF 335 kb)

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Smith, B., Martin, L., Martin, S. et al. What drives site performance in clinical trials?. Nat Rev Drug Discov 17, 389–390 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd.2018.51

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