Novo Nordisk, Takeda, Servier, Celgene among top sponsors rated by investigative sites in new CenterWatch survey

Boston, Mass., March 2, 2015-More than 1,900 global investigative sites rate the best biopharmaceutical companies with which to work in a new survey conducted by CenterWatch, a leading provider of global clinical trials information. The survey results were released today in the March issue of The CenterWatch Monthly newsletter.

Investigative sites rated sponsor companies on more than three-dozen individual relationship attributes.  The top five highest-rated large sponsors-those with 2013 total revenue from drug sales greater than $11 billion-were Novo Nordisk, Takeda, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Janssen.  The top five mid-sized and small sponsors-with 2013 total revenue from drug sales less than $11 billion-were Servier, Celgene, Biogen Idec, Otsuka and Forest Laboratories (acquired by Actavis last year).

Today’s industry-wide focus on patient centric clinical trials has driven sponsors to  invest more time and resources in their investigative site relationships with the ultimate goal to better engage and enhance study volunteer participation experiences.  To achieve this goal, sponsors have implemented a number of initiatives to reduce protocol complexity and improve study feasibility, efficiency and convenience.  These initiatives are beginning to pay off.  The new survey marks one of the few times in almost two decades that such strong improvement was observed in sponsors narrowing their performance gaps across relationship attributes that sites rate as most important in defining relationship effectiveness. These include quality of monitors, study support and easily accessible staff to resolve problems.

“Sponsors are taking the sites’ feedback to heart, as we have seen strong progress since our last global site survey in 2013,” said Joan Chambers, COO of CenterWatch. “Effective sponsor-site relationships are key to accurate, on-time and on-budget clinical trial conduct, as well as to a successful patient engagement and experience.”

The CenterWatch Global Investigative Site Relationship Survey was first launched in 1997. This year’s survey was conducted online between October 2014 and January 2015, and asked principal investigators, sub-investigators and study coordinators to rate the sponsors with whom they worked during the past two years on 38 relationship attributes, from study planning to innovation, and to rate the importance of those attributes as well. A total of 24 sponsors with sufficient sample sizes were profiled in the analysis.