Outsourcing strategy frees up R&D resources

A top pharmaceutical company was struggling to meet the demands of its R&D pipeline. Bain researched and created a decision framework that will help the company quadruple the percent of its clinical budget that is more cost-effectively outsourced, allowing the company to focus more R&D resources on drug discovery and innovation.

Facing a challenging market environment, PharmaCo needed a new clinical development sourcing strategy that would allow it to address its growing pipeline under existing budget constraints.

PharmaCo, a top-5 pharmaceutical company, was historically extremely conservative with its sourcing of clinical trials, outsourcing less than 10% of its clinical budget and keeping all complicated tasks in-house
PharmaCo's existing sourcing strategy was unable to meet the demands of its pipeline given budget constraints and challenges to the pharmaceutical industry
Under PharmaCo's existing strategy, it was missing the opportunity to use clinical sourcing to help it overcome challenges to its business:
- The clinical outsourcing industry was maturing, with the largest outsourcing companies performing more trials than the largest pharmaceutical companies
- The supply of clinical resources (patients and investigators) was decreasing
- Trials were increasingly moving to low-cost, high-recruitment regions
PharmaCo was also failing to take advantage of innovative, strategic sourcing relationships in which other pharmaceutical companies were beginning to enter
PharmaCo asked Bain to assess the clinical outsourcing landscape and recommend to PharmaCo a new clinical sourcing strategy that captured what, why, how, and to whom it should outsource

Next Approach

Bain conducted extensive primary and secondary market research to create a comprehensive picture of the clinical outsourcing market.

Next Recommendations

Bain created a framework for PharmaCo to use when deciding what, how, and to whom it should outsource.

Next Results

PharmaCo is in the process of implementing Bain's recommendations, which will allow the company to focus R&D resources on its core differentiators: drug discovery and innovation.