provider - Blog - Global Risk Community2024-03-29T15:21:39Zhttps://globalriskcommunity.com/profiles/blogs/feed/tag/providerHealthcare CRO Services and Pharma: A Bird Eye’s Viewhttps://globalriskcommunity.com/profiles/blogs/healthcare-cro-services-and-pharma-a-bird-eye-s-view2020-04-29T10:31:41.000Z2020-04-29T10:31:41.000ZKBV Researchhttps://globalriskcommunity.com/members/KBVResearch<div><p>Healthcare CRO services industry found its initial foundation when pharmaceutical companies were able to do all of their in-house R&D, but were often faced with capacity issues, and it was this occasional need for excess capacity, where resources were limited, that led to the creation of the first CROs. By then, for many other reasons, sponsors have opted to outsource R&D operations, including obtaining resources that are not available in-house, achieving a decrease in fixed prices, and benefiting from greater global scope.</p><p></p><p><a href="{{#staticFileLink}}8028316253,original{{/staticFileLink}}" target="_blank"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}8028316253,original{{/staticFileLink}}" class="align-center" alt="8028316253?profile=original" /></a></p><p></p><p>The industry has been witnessing the emergence of a large number of new drugs and the rise of the smaller biotech market. These two factors, combined with the increasing cost of drug production, helped to shift the competitive relationship between pharmaceutical and CROs, providing the impetus for CROs to expand their services and market. The healthcare CRO services industry has been gradually rising in recent years.</p><p></p><h2><strong>What are healthcare CRO Services?</strong></h2><p><a href="https://www.kbvresearch.com/healthcare-cro-services-market/">Contract research organizations (CROs)</a> usually provide discovery and development services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical devices (often referred to as sponsors) industries, but may also support foundations, academic agencies, and universities.</p><p>Through planning and performing clinical trials to test the new molecule in humans, CROs organize and perform tasks in the R&D process. Being independent organizations, they provide in the clinical setting an unbiased evaluation of a potential drug and, being they work with other firms, usually provide greater expertise than if the sponsors conducted the trials themselves. CROs derive much of their revenue from sponsor R&D budgets, with work being carried out in the form of outsourced contracted services that are short or long term.</p><p></p><h2><strong>Here’s why pharma companies are using CRO services progressively:</strong></h2><p>Pharma can have access to skills and knowledge that are not otherwise available within the organization. They can also move from xed to variable cost model to reduce the internal resource utilization. Healthcare CRO programs will give patients greater global scope and access. In addition, they are often of high quality, ensuring more effective implementation along with reducing criteria for oversight. The companies include lower capital costs, quicker timelines for growth and a faster route to market.</p><h2><strong>Healthcare CRO services trends:</strong></h2><h3><strong>The emergence of R&D marketplaces to streamline contract research offering</strong></h3><p>A major trend in outsourcing pharmaceutical research is the rise of new marketplace types that link pharmaceutical sponsors with CROs, academic institutions, and biotech start-ups through advanced digital infrastructure. Research marketplaces allow sponsors to search for different R&D service providers, participate in a transaction, manage projects, arrange payment schedules and automate the entire cycle of R&D service sourcing. In my own experience, I consider those marketplaces to be extremely useful in curbing overhead management.</p><p></p><h3><strong>Rising demand for specialized testing services</strong></h3><p>Many pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies are currently focused on building a diverse product portfolio and developing new molecules, both small and big. Delivery devices, combination products, and reformulated or re-engineered drugs are being developed by firms to meet unmet requirements.</p><p>Pharmaceutical industries focus on a variety of specialized testing services, such as liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/ MS), gene expression analysis, RNA sequencing, compendia raw materials wet chemistry analysis, Inductively Coupled Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) trace metal analysis and several others. Pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical firms tend to outsource these advanced research facilities to CROs in order to save the expense of equipment and labour.</p><p></p><h3><strong>Biotech start-ups drive big pharma’s innovation</strong></h3><p>Biotech start-ups and small pharmaceutical companies are starting to have a significant impact on the medical research environment in general, and the CRO industry in particular — with a 103% rise in the number of new molecular entities (NMEs) identified by small pharmaceutical firms, which accounted for 63% of all new prescription drug approvals over the past five years. Many such companies develop research collaborations with big pharma to further advance their technologies or provide advanced skills, services and resources in research.</p><p>Large drug makers' strategic role is now to extend or acquire external R&D collaborations with smaller innovators — 2019 has been a productive year for M&A operation in the pharmaceutical industry. While acquiring tiny, emerging companies is a long-standing strategy for big pharmaceuticals, the M&A landscape will heat up due to an increasingly diverse market of advanced technologies and inventions, and a rising competitive interest in biotech M&As from the side of big CROs and recent newcomers to the pharmaceutical industry — tech giants.</p><p></p><h3><strong>Healthcare CRO services and Machine Learning</strong></h3><p>Advancements in the efficiency of clinical trials equal savings. For example, an ML platform may enable pre-clinical trials to be performed to allow early detection of populations that are most likely to react to a drug and to identify biomarkers showing the most potential for patient response, thereby refining the compound and the design of the trial.</p><p>Predictive analytics based on ML are used in the recruiting, retention and interaction of patients. Identifying and hiring the right applicants for example speeds up the timelines for R&D. Patient interaction during the trial is becoming increasingly essential as clinicians extend their use of Health IT including health management applications and wearables.</p><p>Real-world data can also be used to build a "digital twin" alongside multi-omic mapping of the patients receiving a research product. It is a reflection of a single person representing over time their physiological and molecular status as well as their lifestyle. For example, digital twins might be used to explain what would have happened to the patient had they been given placebo or the standard of care. Clinicians may use this model to assess various treatment strategies by comparing potential results to the patient, without any real risk.</p><p></p><h2><strong>Summing up</strong></h2><p>As sponsors face rising regulatory scrutiny, high marketing costs, and patent expirations on key blockbuster products, they are increasingly turning to outsourced specialist providers to lower costs and speed up market time. In addition, CROs' growth has increased over the past few years, with factors including rising spending on R&D, growing penetration outsourcing and the need for more nuanced clinical trials to promote overall market development.</p><p></p><p><strong>Free Valuable Insights:</strong> <a href="https://www.kbvresearch.com/news/healthcare-cro-services-market/">Global Healthcare CRO Services Market to reach a market size of USD 57.1 billion by 2025</a></p><p></p><p>We expect the significant amount of M&A activity seen in previous years to continue with a favorable M&A climate and sustained development in the CRO sector. The CRO business is one that continues to evolve as we expand our knowledge of science and technology making the industry 'one to watch' for exciting M&A transactions in the near future.</p></div>Does Your Internet Provider Care About Your Privacy?https://globalriskcommunity.com/profiles/blogs/does-your-internet-provider-care-about-your-privacy2019-02-26T13:54:33.000Z2019-02-26T13:54:33.000ZCassie Phillipshttps://globalriskcommunity.com/members/CassiePhillips685<div><p><b>No</b></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">To sum it up briefly, no, they don’t care, not as a principle in itself. Most ISPs would happily sell your data if they thought it constituted a solid business decision, and it would be unwise to entirely trust an ISP to do right by your data. It’s far too valuable for that, especially when it’s combined with the data and browsing habits of millions of other users. There might be exceptions when it comes to small municipal providers that are run locally, but they often have a different setup, motivations, and don’t have as large of a data set to provide.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">Yet now that that’s settled, there’s plenty more to talk about on the subject. What would make them care, and what is preventing them from breaching your privacy right now? Also, how can you better protect yourself and your privacy should ISPs get more aggressive? We’re going to look into the answers to these questions and perhaps get into the reasoning of some ISPs for their practices.</span></p><p><b>They Track Everything</b></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">In the economy of big data, you can be certain that any major ISP is tracking you, and even the smaller may keep records as a matter of course to potentially comply better with courts. There is no legal requirement currently (this may vary by country), but cooperation with law enforcement (and other entities) can become common.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">Additionally, and perhaps more notably where your privacy is concerned, ISPs might work with marketers to use your browsing habits either directly or indirectly. While they might be less likely to sell your data directly, they might create campaigns or profiles and then sell those. It is part of an alarming trend alongside social media practices and companies like Amazon and Google collecting massive amounts of data. Effectively, you are not only being sold a product, but you are the product.</span></p><p><b>They Probably Don’t Care About You as an Individual</b></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">Most of what you do will not interest your ISP. If you’re like most internet users, you’re probably rather boring to them and just another number on a spreadsheet. They aren’t actively reading your chat logs and they aren’t listening to your video calls. They don’t have the resources to do that for everyone and the would have little to gain compared to the cost. Your value lies more in the metadata that you and other users provide for marketers both internal and external (more on that later).</span></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">They might care about and be on the lookout for the following:</span></p><ul><li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Potentially highly illegal activities or activities that your government may not approve of (this can depend on your country, as in some countries governments will work with ISPs to root out dissidents). Many ISPs will keep records just in case they are subpoenaed by the courts at various levels.</span></li><li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">A massive use of data far beyond what the average person uses, especially if you have a normal plan. They might react to this through throttling or more active monitoring of your online activity.</span></li><li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">A pattern of downloads that signals that you are regularly downloading and distributing copyrighted content illegally. This monitoring is how they can send out notices and warnings to people doing so.</span></li></ul><p><span style="font-weight:400;">This isn’t an exhaustive list, and they might be interested in other things such as when you are online, how long you are active for at a time online, how long you stay on certain sites and pages, and what devices you and other household members use to access the internet. Most of this metadata collection is for marketing purposes and doesn’t necessarily pose a threat, but it can still be intrusive for many.</span></p><p><b>They Do Care About Potential Liability</b></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">If you keep track of the news regularly, you can probably get an idea of just how devastating a major data breach for a company is. Yahoo had to decrease its sale price to Verizon by $350 million over a single data breach. Even with lesser numbers, any ISP is going to take every precaution they can to prevent liability. Outside of the US where the regulations might be stronger, a full breach would cripple the company.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">To summarize, ISPs are surely protecting your data quite well, since the consequences of not doing so would be a PR and potentially a financial disaster. Not only do they want to protect their assets, but they also want to protect their reputation in the market. Would you sign up with the ISP who lost everyone’s data if there were other options available?</span></p><p><b>They Might Care that You Care</b></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">Just because they may want and use your data doesn’t mean that your data is their top priority. Their top priority is the bottom line, and enough customers that get angry about the situation might mean that they change their tune on the matter, at least at a surface level (you can expect at least some ISPs to pay lip service to the idea and then just be more subtle in their efforts to use your data in the future, unless protections or guarantees are in place). If enough people threaten to switch providers to a more privacy-friendly option, you can expect the market to adjust.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">It should be noted, however, that this won’t work for many people if only for the fact that there is only one real provider in a region, and the ISP can simply tell users to accept their policies or get no internet service. Privacy protection at that point would require government intervention, which would be no easy task to organize.</span></p><p><b>The Situation Can Change</b></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">It is very important to note that anything about this situation can change, as laws and regulations regarding the internet are not set in stone and change with every administration. For example, in 2017 privacy protections</span> <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/03/30/fcc-privacy-rules-how-isps-will-actually-sell-your-data/#39754b1b21d1"><span style="font-weight:400;">were repealed by the FCC</span></a><span style="font-weight:400;">, leading to many of the problems we see today. Debates happen constantly about the issue and lobbyists are hard at work for both sides to influence future legislation. Combine this with the many interests involved with online privacy and you can see that it might be difficult, but worthwhile, to follow the news on this matter.</span></p><p><b>How to Protect Yourself</b></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">In truth, there might not be any perfect method to protect your privacy from ISP intrusion other than to entirely cut the cord, and that’s for the most part unacceptable in today’s world. However, you can make it more difficult for ISPs and you can minimize the potential intrusions. We recommend the following practices and tools for this purpose:</span></p><ul><li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">A Virtual Private Network (VPN) can help mask your browsing activity to your ISP (and everyone else) and is a common security and privacy measure used by millions. If your ISP wants to check to see what you’ve been up to, all they’ll see if your connection to the VPN. You’ll want to use one whenever possible, and you’ll also want to get a fast enough internet speed to make up for the VPN slowdown. Make sure you use a premium VPN as well, as the free ones might sell your data or are astonishingly slow.</span></li><li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">ISPs are limited in the content and URLs they can see when you use only HTTPS sites, although they can usually see the sites you are going to. It is a better form of protection than nothing, even if it is quite limiting.</span></li><li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Limit the information you voluntarily share as a rule. How many services and apps really need your location data for you to live a normal life? Does everyone need to know your emails or your phone number? Your ISP will ask for information, often trying to trick you in the process. Be wary and provide them with as little as possible.</span></li><li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">Not all ISPs are equal in their invasion of your privacy. Some are less apt to cooperate with governments for fear of angering their user base. If you have a local provider or another available, you may wish to switch to them in order to protect yourself.</span></li><li style="font-weight:400;"><span style="font-weight:400;">You can just wait in some cases. You can check ISPs as to their data retention policy. That being said, how trustworthy each of them is when it comes to this can certainly come into question.</span></li></ul><p><span style="font-weight:400;">This is a constantly evolving issue, so we would also like to encourage people to stay on top of it in order to make sure that they know their current rights and are aware of what ISPs are able to do (both politically and technologically). Additional protections and technologies might also come out to help users maintain their privacy in the coming months and years.</span></p><p><b>Conclusion</b></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">Chances are that your internet service provider doesn’t care the least bit about your privacy, but thankfully it probably doesn’t care about what you are doing either. Yet this doesn’t necessarily give them any right to many people to invade your habits either, in the eyes of many. You may want to switch providers, make your voice known, or use some of the protective measures listed above. And we hope you do, as ISPs will listen to people (and their wallets).</span></p><p><span style="font-weight:400;">Bio: Kevin Conner is the founder and CEO of Vast Bridges, a customer acquisition and lead generation company in the home services arena. Since 2011 more than 10M consumers and businesses have used Vast Bridges' web properties to search for Internet and TV service. Most recently he and a small team have launched</span> <a href="https://www.broadbandsearch.net/"><span style="font-weight:400;">broadbandsearch.net</span></a><span style="font-weight:400;">, the U.S.'s leading home services (broadband and TV) search engine.</span></p></div>