At Austin Health Olivia Newton-John Cancer and Wellness Centre – Cancer Clinical Trials we have been tracking the cost of participation in collaborative group studies for a number of years and have in recent times found that many studies have losses of greater than $10,000.

Sites are only able to support non commercial studies through participation in commercial studies. Unfortunately Australia is no longer considered by the Pharmaceutical Industry to be an attractive place to do research.  For the following reasons

      We are the third most expensive country in the world after the US and Japan in which to do research

      We are slow to getting studies up and running

      We don’t met our accrual targets  

Consequently Pharmaceutical companies are no longer writing generous budgets and to keep commercial studies coming to Australia we have little bargaining power.

To maintain financial support for Non commercial studies we have looked at what drives the costs. The main driver is study coordinator salaries. We measure study coordinator salaries against studies by getting the Study coordinators to log the hours they spend on a study an then by multiplying this number by the hourly rate. Our estimate of study coordinator salaries is generous as we don’t apply over heads or on costs. Despite this the cost of allocating a study coordinator to a non commercial study is still high.  

  The way to control this cost is to examine ways whereby the number of paid hours required to run a non commercial study could be reduced. Areas that could be streamlined to avoid unnecessary cost  are start up activities, study and CRF design and data management.