Parexel, one of the world’s largest clinical research organisations (CROs), sees India emerging as a favourable destination to conduct clinical trials as global pharmaceutical and biotech companies make a beeline to test their potential drugs on Indian patients, a top executive of the company said.

“In the past, if they wanted to do clinical trials in 28 countries, India used to be 20th on the list. But, now, India started popping up among the top 5-10 countries (to do trials),” said Sanjay Vyas, EVP, safety & logistics and country head, in an interview with ET.

Vyas said some factors that are driving companies to prefer India over others, especially for late-stage clinical trials, include regulatory changes that took place in 2019 that cut approval timelines by 30-40%, high diseases prevalence, large diverse patient population, and improvement in medical infrastructure and availability of investigators, trial sites in metro and tier-1 cities, and current geopolitical environment. “Ukraine (and Russia) were clinical trial hubs in Eastern Europe. Due to war many of the sponsor companies have pivoted to different countries as an alternative… India definitely has benefited out of that,” Vyas added.

“Over 90 new applications came in the last 18 months and this was to do studies in India by largely global pharma and a couple of local multinationals as well,” Vyas said.

To improve patient convenience, Parexel has been trying to adopt decentralised or hybrid trials in India that enable studies to be run remotely. To accelerate trials, the CRO is also trying to leverage real-world evidence and real-world to weigh potential benefits and risks of a drug.

Vyas says the Indian CRO industry has the potential to be more than $3 billion in the next five to seven years. Vyas however cautions that “stagflation” in US and Europe could impact Indian clinical trial industry.