Driven by several factors, industry funding for clinical research at US academic medical centers has increased significantly over the past two years, according to a new survey. If the trend continues, it may eventually counter a nearly decade-long decline in industry revenues that has exacerbated financial difficulties at many academic centers.

Credit: Source: CenterWatch Surveys of AMCs

According to Centerwatch, the Boston-based market research organization that carried out the survey, the growth of for-profit clinical research centers, called site management organizations, steadily siphoned industry-funded research away from costlier, less efficient academic medical centers through most of the 1990s. “Typically the academic medical centers provided slower service as well as poorer quality [of research administration]. That's why the sponsors started going to the independent centers,” says Annick DeBruin, a market analyst for Centerwatch.

However, the survey of 20 academic medical centers around the country shows that the return of industry funding is linked to the establishment of central clinical research coordination offices, which streamline the process of setting up trials and reduce bureaucratic red tape. Between 1997 and 1999, the proportion of academic centers with a centralized clinical trial office rose from 9% to 45%; at the same time, industry-sponsored clinical grant revenue grew by 17%, compared to a 15% increase in NIH-funded clinical research.

The expansion of pharmaceutical research pipelines has also driven many companies back to academic centers, and the majority of industry-sponsored research at these centers now consists of the larger phase II and phase III drug trials, rather than initial investigations, according to Centerwatch.

Edward McWilliams, a project manager at Merck, explains that pharmaceutical companies are increasingly targeting complex diseases in highly specific ways and that the patients who are appropriate for such trials are typically treated by a specialist, which usually means they are to be found within the setting of an academic medical center. McWilliams adds, “Placing studies with these centers gives us both faster recruitment rates and, in the long term, may help with the marketing of a drug.”

Thus, companies do not seem to object to the comparatively high cost of doing clinical trials at the centers now that the bureaucratic problems are being solved, and they are willing to absorb the extra costs in exchange for access to top researchers and specific patient populations. The increase in revenue is timely for the centers, many of which have been hit hard by changes in federal funding rules and the high cost of overhauling their clinical research procedures in the wake of a crackdown by the Office of Protection from Research Risks (Nature Med., 6, 611, 2000).