C&R Research readying to provide contract clinical research services in U.S.

C&R Research, South Korea’s largest contract research organization (CRO), is on its way to penetrate the United States based on a partnership built through its acquisition of an undisclosed equity interest from a U.S. CRO armed with expertise on regulatory authority matters, according to C&R Research’s chief executive.

“We have completed preparatory work to enter the U.S. market. We will start our joint CRO business in the second half of this year,” C&R Research CEO Yoon Moon-tae told Maeil Business Newspaper in a recent interview in Seoul.

The name of the U.S. CRO company is not disclosed, but it is the company with extensive experience in filing Investigational New Drug Applications (IND) to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical trials, which is expected pave the way for the Korean company’s fast inroads into the U.S. market, Yoon said.

C&R Research has so far conducted more than 2,000 clinical trials for Korean pharmaceutical and biotech firms. The company started to speed up its global foray this year by increasing the number of employees from 300 last year to more than 400.

Yoon who has led C&R Research for 25 years is a key person in the local CRO industry, who introduced quantification and statistics to clinical development systems for the first time in Korea.

After graduating from Seoul National University’s College of Pharmacy, Yoon took charge of product development at Dong-A Pharmaceutical in 1978, and then joined LG in 1984 to manage clinical trials.

C&R Research reported 34.1 billion won ($27.1 million) in sales in 2020 and 43.2 billion won last year, hitting a record high for two consecutive years, and is expected to exceed 50 billion won this year.

Yoon emphasized that fully digitized clinical development is now a global standard in the industry, which means the use of IT-based programs throughout the research, clinical and regulatory process is a norm.

Accordingly, Yoon pays the most attention to the company’s IT solution development on top of its advancement into global markets. Since its U.S. CRO partner has many global pharmaceutical companies as customers, C&R Research can access necessary resources to build its own IT solution, Yoon said.

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