By any standards, last year was a turbulent one for the pharmaceutical sector. The patent cliff claimed some of the industry’s most profitable properties and with the market share of these drugs losing ground to generics, put even more pressure on the top- and bottom-line performance of key players such as Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca, to name just two of the worst hit.

Such pressure – and the drive to cut fixed costs that goes with it – has been a boon for clinical CROs, which have become increasingly indispensable to the business of drug discovery, as clinical development is outsourced and specialist units, such as clinical laboratories, are offloaded to CROs in long-term guaranteed strategic partnerships.

Meanwhile, the loss of key blockbusters from patent protection has placed ever more emphasis on pipelines and the corresponding need for service providers able to perform the necessary clinical development work to take promising candidates through to market.

For these reasons, despite the gloomy picture painted by Big Pharma’s numbers for the full year – a roughly 3% average year-on-year slide in revenues and almost 4% drop in earnings across the leading firms – it remains a positive climate for the CRO sector.

This content and the accompanying datapack provide a snapshot of the CRO market in 2012, outlining key pharma and non-pharma partnerships shaping the sector.