As I read Contrarian’s comments they seem to say that CROs operate to the same standards as pharmas, and not whether pharmas apply similar rigorous standards to CROs. in my experience that would be true. Again whether pharma is blase eough to spend all that money without adequate monitoring is another one altogether.

Chris

The legitimate CROs operate according to the same GCPs that pharma does and have rigoruos SOPs in force. They may do much better work than the pharma companies themselves because they don’t have the big conflict of interest and operate with little bias.

I’m not so sure I can agree with this. The problem is that sponsor companies, in general, do not provide the necessary oversight of CROs to ensure compliance with either CRO or sponsor SOPs, let alone GCPs. The quality of the work and trial is dependent on the project managers/directors at both the CRO and the sponsors. Too often, people at the sponsor company rail against actually managing the CRO by claiming it’s duplicating work but, in doing so, they are abrogating their responsibilities. Without active management of the CRO, they can and will take liberties and lower standards which leads to poor quality research overall.