I could not resist the temptation to title this blog post “Trial Cost Gets Hot” given it’s August and temperatures are soaring in places like San Antonio Texas and Death Valley (where by the way you can jump into an all-natural “hot springs” pool to “cool” off. But to jump right in to this topic, I want to discuss how pleased we were to publish some top line results on the cost of clinical trials recently in Nature Review Drug Discovery. At the time of authoring the article, I didn’t realize it would stir such strong opinions and reactions about how much trials cost, or at least how much we think they cost
But whatever your current understanding of the cost of clinical trials, we believe the time is right for companies to start measuring and analyzing the cost of clinical trials and to begin more thoughtful dialogue on what it means….what it means to be a high cost company; or what it means to be an efficient company.
The bottom line is that wherever your company sits on this pendulum is only the start of the discussion and the interpretation depends on what question you are trying to answer or what your company is trying to achieve.
Benchmarking cost at an individual trial level takes a bit of effort and maybe even a little trial and error, but when done right, it can be an extremely powerful tool in shaping and driving performance. Indeed, cost is a lever in not only efficiency, but also in getting drugs to market faster.
Only by having access to this type of reliable cost data using a framework that can help the discussion can you start to gain insight into differing strategies and their results.
We start our next round of Trial Cost this month. Hope you can join us.
Carpe diem!
Linda Martin
President and Founder
KMR Group
