Australian CRO expands Hong Kong operations to meet growing demand
The company established its operations in Hong Kong in 2013 with six staffers, COO John Moller told Outsourcing-Pharma.com, noting the company’s work in the region has grown “faster than expected.”
Although Hong Kong doesn’t offer much cost savings when compared with running trials in the US or Australia, Moller said, there is an efficiency with its large hospitals and unified EHR (electronic health record) system.
"Hong Kong is a significant market in high demand from US- and Europe-based pharma and biotech sponsors. In addition, the city is officially recognised by the China Food and Drug Administration for conducting clinical trials for drug registration purposes in mainland China in certain therapeutic areas," Moller added.
He noted that endocrinology, oncology, respiratory and cardiology trials are all growing in Hong Kong. In addition, the regulatory approval timelines are relatively quick, taking about four months as companies can receive regulatory approvals and do contract negotiations in parallel.
“When we’re doing feasibility studies [in Hong Kong] there are fast turnaround times for the results and that’s really attractive,” Moller said. “And we haven’t used it yet, but there’s a government-sponsored state of the art Phase I unit too.”
"In the next few years, we also see a need to expand our workforce by recruiting experts locally to meet with our business expansion," he said.
Novotech now has the ability to move between China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, which is “attractive to our sponsors to be able to say we have this hub,” Moller said.
The expansion in Hong Kong comes as the company also recently expanded its operations into Shanghai, China and South Africa one year ago. In both of those moves the company cited biotech growth as one of the reasons behind the expansions.
