Pressures on UK contract research market generating innovative trial approaches

There are a multitude of pressures on UK clinical trial research but, overall, things are looking up. The UK is a valuable market for the industry, and the resurgence in interest in the funding of research from the government is revitalizing the National Health Service, although recent overspends will dampen things for a while. The industry is designing more and more complex medications that need specialised handling and infusion, but the NHS is moving care out into the community.

Innovative solutions to these competing pressures are being developed. One such development is the creation of a trial support organization called the Medical Research Network, a division of Healthcare At Home - the UK's largest provider of home therapy for complex medications.

Clinical research funding in the UK has steadily lost ground over the last 10 years, mainly due to superior patient recruitment rates in central and eastern Europe causing an erosion of pharmaceutical company-sponsored trials. In outsourced studies, the drive towards the east is inexorable, with some major European clinical research organization operations having as much as 50% of all their clincial research asociates based in countries previously to the east of the old "Iron Curtain." Beyond Europe, new sources of patients are set to develop within the Indian subcontinent and the Far East, in particular in China.