Synexus Clinical Research of the UK has bolstered its position in the outsourced clinical trials market via the opening of a new centre in Hungary.
The new unit, which uses the same ‘hub’ site model favoured by Synexus in its business strategy, adds to the company’s growing portfolio of more than 15 sites in the UK, Eastern Europe and India.
These hub sites uniformly deliver an excellent patient experience and are attentive to cultural differences, in order to minimise costly patient dropout during the course of a clinical trial.
Synexus combines specialist recruitment and clinical trial management services with dedicated clinical centres that crucially do not rely on external investigators for studies, having their own full-time clinical staff.
Dr Ian Smith, Synexus’ medical director, told PharmaTimes recently that this approach reduces the number of sites need to run a study, increases the number of patients that can enrolled at each centre and shortens the duration of the trial, potentially carving millions of dollars off the cost of a typical Phase II or III protocol.
Commenting on the acquisition, Smith said: “through this latest acquisition, we can continue to grow our reputation for providing our clients with superior clinical trials, on time while dramatically reducing their costs.”
“Typically, a pharmaceutical company, which uses Synexus to recruit and run a clinical trial, will make a saving of over 80% on set up and monitoring costs when compared with carrying out the trial through many part time investigators,” according to Synexus.
The new Synexus hub centre, which was previously known as Diagnostics Units Hungary, is based in Budapest and has been established for some years.
The expansion addresses a shift in geography in clinical testing into developing markets such as Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Asia, which have the enormous benefit of large numbers of treatment-naive patients who do not require earlier therapies to be washed out or who might otherwise be excluded from a trial.
The cost per patient also tends to be lower in emerging economies, and including patients from these areas also ties in with regulatory moves to encourage drug testing on ethnically-diverse populations. As a result, a recent report by Piribo estimated that, at present, the number of multicentre clinical trials being carried out in the CEE region is growing on average at an annual rate of 30%.
