The Globalization of Clinical Trials for New Medicines: Where are the Trials Going and Why?

We begin by documenting trends in the changing geographical location of clinical trials for new medicines since 2002, away from Western Europe and Canada, and towards Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia. We then develop a framework for modeling the factors affecting the globalization of clinical trials, particularly into emerging economies. Factors we investigate include country-specific measures of medical infrastructure, costs per patient in the trial, intellectual property protection, size of potential host country market for pharmaceuticals, and measures of e-readiness. We find that factors affecting the globalization process are relative costs per patient, changing intellectual property protection, size of the host country's potential market size, and human capital capabilities.