The Globalization of Clinical Trials: Where are the Trials Going and Why?
Fabio A. Thiers, M.D., Research Fellow, MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology While the participation of individual emerging economies in industry-sponsored clinical research has received much recent attention, reliable quantitative evidence on the extent to which countries and regions are gaining or losing shares of participation in global clinical trials is sparse. We report on research into the changing location of clinical trials since 2002, and document the relatively dissimilar patterns of engagement of Eastern European, Latin American and Asian nations, as well as distinct ways the major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are turning clinical drug development into a truly global endeavor. We also report results from an econometric model that depicts how changes in the size of host countrys market, clinical research infrastructure, intellectual property protection, and trial costs per patient have been affecting their p
