Seven-year-old GleneaglesCRC is garnering a lot of firsts lately.

Last fall, the Singapore-based firm became the first contract research organization (CRO) to open an office in western Australia expressly for the purpose of marketing to U.S. and European drug companies that need to recruit lots of Caucasians.

Also last year, it became the first CRO to open a data-management center in the Philippines.

Last summer, it was one of the first CROs to set up operations in Indonesia.

GleneaglesCRC won Frost & Sullivan’s Asia Pacific Healthcare best practice award, as well as being named its clinical research outsourcing industry Asian CRO of the year (Singapore) for 2006.

And, with the purchase of Phase Forward’s Clintrial software late last year for use in the Philippines as well as Singapore and China, the company has positioned itself as one of the most technologically advanced CROs in Asia.

Indeed, it’s been quite a year for Gleneagles, which is a subsidiary of the hospital group Parkway Holdings Limited, southeast Asia’s largest private healthcare company, with three hospitals in Singapore. As such, Gleneagles is the only service management organization-model CRO on that continent, a boon to their marketing efforts.

“We have access to all the hospitals and doctors, labs, diagnostics, radiology units and all ancillary services,” boasts Lance Michael Eminger, senior business development manager for the Gleneagles.
Location, Location, Location

But more important than easy access to all those hospitals, and thus patients, is the location of Gleneagles’ offices, says Eminger. In addition to its new offices in Australia (Perth), and Indonesia (Jakarta), and its headquarters and data center in Singapore, and data center in the Philippines (Manila), the company also has locations in China (Beijing and Shanghai), South Korea (Seoul), and Thailand (Bangkok). Eight locations in total, seven of them in Asia.

“The Asian market is hot,” Eminger says.

That, he adds, is mainly because of easy recruitment; there are just more people in, say, China, than the U.S. or Europe, and clinical trial participation is fairly new in most Asian countries. Thus, it’s unlikely that recruitment will be hampered because, say, potential subjects are involved in other trials.
Speedy Set-Up

Also, in some Asian countries, the regulatory process is short, which is attractive to pharmaceutical companies looking to set up trials there, says Eminger. For example, in South Korea and Indonesia, it can take just two to four months to set up a trial, he says.

Then of course, there is the exponentially lower cost of doing business, which gets passed onto to the pharma companies. “We are currently running at one-third the cost of a U.S. trial,” says Eminger.

Acceptance of western companies in Asia can be dicey, though, as many don’t want Western CROs coming in and using the population as “guinea pigs,” says Eminger. Thus, first-in-man trials aren’t generally allowed there. “Foreign companies can’t do early trial work. You have to do it in your own country first,” he says.

That’s a small price to pay. The market is still very attractive to CROs and the drug companies that contract with them, says Eminger.
GCP in Asia?

Eminger says he understands that some in the Western world worry that Asian sites may not truly understand good clinical practice (GCP), the standard for the design, performance, monitoring, analysis and reporting of clinical trials in the U.S. But he says that’s not so—not now. 

“When I first came to Singapore 10 years ago, it was difficult to find a trained investigator in Asia,” he recalls. “But now because of the push into Asia, every CRO is doing trials here, so everyone has to be trained in GCP. It has been adopted all over Asia.”

In fact, he says, Singapore came out with its own GCP designations recently. They are just as stringent as those in the U.S. and are enforceable by law.
Success Down Under

It looks like Australia is working out well for Gleneagles, too. The company just landed a contract with Beltsville, Md.-based Spherix Incorporated to conduct Phase III clinical trials through its Perth location on Naturlose as a treatment for Type 2 diabetes.

Eminger says the push into western Australia was strategic, as the FDA requires that the population in some clinical trials reflect that of the U.S.; western Australia can provide the Caucasian component. And, as with Asia, the cost of doing business is much lower. “All the CROs are in Australia, but none have focused on it as a low-cost Caucasian center,” says Eminger.

GleneaglesCRC tends to focus in five therapeutic areas: infectious disease; oncology; cardiology; gastrointestinal; and diabetes. In total, across its eight offices, and over its seven years in business, the firm has done about 200 trials.

—Suz Redfearn