The cost of conducting clinical research in US is steadily escalating, largely because of unsuccessful domestic subject
recruitment, leading to costly time delays. This
is forcing pharmaceutical and biotech companies to look abroad for
solutions. In fact, 86% of the US clinical studies fail to recruit the required number
of subjects on time, according to Thomson Center-Watch statistics. As a
result, many companies are currently outsourcing all the phases of clinical
research. Phase III clinical trials, in particular, are increasingly moving to
non-US markets due to the increased demand for multiple trials and larger
subject pools. If one considers that more than 40% of product development
costs are incurred during the clinical trial process, this growing trend
of outsourcing clinical research to countries, where costs are dramatically
reduced, is understandable.
Despite the similarity in environmental and disease traits, there are
striking differences between various Asian countries as far as the
pharmaceutical market size and health expenditures are concerned. This difference is
primarily due to the differences in regulatory and business
environments. Tables 1 and 2 bring out these
differences across Asian countries. The Japanese and Chinese
pharmaceutical markets are huge and hence, attract a lot of investment.
However, there are striking differences in the per capita health expenditure
between Asian countries, which varies significantly from $27 in India to $2,662
in Japan. Considering the huge population base in Asian countries, it still
offers a huge value proposition for the pharmaceutical industry to
undertake clinical trials and market its products in the Asian countries.
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