Benchmarking and R&D Consulting Services

Centre for Medicines Research

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Benchmarking and R&D Consulting Services

The Centre for Medicines Research (CMR) International, is a leader in biopharmaceutical R&D performance analytics.  For over 25 years, CMR has worked with the leading global biopharmaceutical companies to assess R&D and Clinical productivity and provide actionable data and insights.

CMR’s performance analytics programmes have been the gold standard for collecting and reporting R&D operations.  Data are collected directly from participating biopharmaceutical companies, validated, standardised, and combined into a large, blinded reporting database. The datasets apply unique depth and historical context to uncover reliable industry trends, set against the changing marketplace.

What makes CMR unique?

  • Benefit from a large proprietary dataset that contains benchmarking information with a wide coverage of modalities including new technologies, vaccines and rare indications
  • Drill down into the data via our powerful and fully customizable online tools and reports to get the actionable analytics data you need
  • Give your people unlimited access to the rich-data enterprise output – install on your company network or intranet or distribute openly to any employee

We offer three distinct services:

  1. Benchmarking
  2. CMR Factbooks
  3. Consulting services
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Benchmarking 

CMR has two flagship programs, Global R&D Performance Metrics and Global Clinical Performance Metrics.

The Global R&D Performance Metrics Program

In response to the increasing need for truly innovative and differentiated drug products, ever increasing cost of development, regulatory and payer challenges, the biopharmaceutical industry is seeking new drug development strategies to maximise R&D productivity and therefore, return on investment.  The CMR Global R&D Performance Metrics Program is a key resource to support R&D decision making and portfolio optimisation within this challenging environment.  The scope of the R&D program spans from late discovery to regulatory approval and launch. Data can be further sliced by several characteristics including therapeutic area, modality, and rare indications.

Metrics captured in the Global R&D program include:

  • Cycle times (including phase transitions and decision-making times)
  • Proof of concept
  • Probability of success
  • Reasons for termination
  • Pipeline volumes
  • Regulatory strategies
  • Lifecycle management
  • R&D productivity

R&D Investment and Project Cost Modules

These modules are associated with the R&D program to provide further insight into R&D costs and productivity.
In addition to the above CMR also collects key expenditure data including the overall ethical pharmaceutical spend as well as sales revenues in a year. Together these data provide a good overview of R&D productivity trends.
CMR also collects information on direct spend per completed project phase. These costs are collected for self-originated and co-developed projects separately using a bottom-up approach. Participants may use these data for benchmarking as well as arriving at a cost per asset calculation. The Project Cost module runs annually to collect this proprietary information from companies.

The Global Clinical Performance Metrics Program

The biopharmaceutical industry is faced with the dual challenge of developing truly innovative and differentiated drug products while reducing costs. The design and execution of effective clinical studies is key to supporting innovative drug development.

The Global Clinical Performance Metrics Program has the breadth and depth to support all your benchmarking, clinical operations, trial planning, country selection requirements as well as address your questions on trial costs.

The scope of the Clinical Performance Metrics Program covers from Protocol synopsis through to Final integrated Report. It includes key enrolment metrics such as subjects enrolled, treated, and completed.

The biopharmaceutical industry is faced with the dual challenge of developing truly innovative and differentiated drug products while reducing costs. The design and execution of effective clinical studies is key to supporting innovative drug development.

Metrics captured in the Global Clinical program include:

  • Trial cycle times (Protocol synopsis developed to Final integrated report)
  • Country cycle times
  • Site metrics
  • Country selection and performance
  • Enrolment metrics
  • Protocol amendments
  • Protocol complexity
  • Patient burden
  • Clinical trial costs
  • Trial quality indicators

Did you know?

R&D spend is steadily growing and is expected to reach approximately $200 billion by 2025. This amounts to approximately 20% of sales revenues which are reinvested into developing drug pipelines.

Clinical cost module

Since 2010, CMR has been collecting direct costs for completed clinical trials. The data is further split into FTE and Non-FTE spend. The Non-FTE spend includes granular activities such as grant costs, comparator drug costs and CRO costs. This data helps CMR to produce more robust clinical productivity measures such as cost per patient per trial and provide correlations between time, cost and quality.

Protocol amendments module

Since 2012, CMR has been running a focused protocol amendments module which collects detailed information on global protocol amendments. This data enables CMR to quantify amendments as well as the nature and reason for amendments. Additionally, CMR can provide correlations between time, enrolment and cost to assess the impact of amendments.

Accessing the CMR Benchmarking data – CiMoR

CMR Global Program participants receive a range of online CiMoR tools, which enable clients to customise metrics to their individual business contexts, supporting planning and strategic decision making within today’s biopharmaceutical industry. Utilising our online tools, participants can interrogate data to improve their understanding of drivers of key metrics.

Factbooks

CMR publishes two Factbooks:

  • 2023 CMR International Pharmaceutical R&D Factbook: Comprehensive snapshot of current trends within R&D including chapters on R&D investments, success rates, launches, regulatory, patents and generics data.
  • 2023 CMR International Pharmaceutical Clinical Factbook: Focused overview of the clinical development including chapters on trial volume, clinical interval durations, outsourcing, trial costs, protocol amendments and country selection.

The Factbooks are definitive reports for decision makers in R&D strategy and clinical operations and can help clients:

  • Gain an in-depth understanding of R&D and clinical operations trends
  • Determine how your organization performs against the market as a whole
  • Recognize the key differences between individual therapeutic areas and regions
  • Set internal performance targets that will challenge and grow your business

Each finding in the book is presented in a clear, easily understood chart, accompanied by a succinct explanation of the methodology used and the definitions applied.

Consulting services

Using our benchmarking intelligence platforms, we apply our expertise to other areas of R&D development. We work alongside biopharmaceuticals, CROs, government, and non-profit organisations to provide insights into specific areas of R&D and clinical productivity, country trial performance rankings, and custom dashboards.

Organizations benefit from our experience in conducting syndicated surveys, analysing, and interpreting results. Recent CMR consulting assignments include:

  • Supporting due diligence teams on new products
  • Helping niche bio-techs, start-ups and CROs to understand their R&D and Clinical performance
  • Working with government bodies to rank a country’s trial performance or providing insights into rare and neglected diseases to non-profit organizations

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