Partnering with Industry: Best Practices Module (Page 18)
Transcript of interview with Jennifer Kerr, President of Cook Research
Cook as a global organization works very regularly with universities and academic institutions. It’s not uncommon, actually quite frequently, where we are doing clinical research, maybe even doing different types of applied research within academic organizations, and really where those relationships form, they form from those physicians who are alsopracticing and seeing patientsand combining their experiences and their interests with those that match up with our interests and our expertise within the Cook organization. As I said, many of our clinical study sites are based at universities, and so we have a very good working relationship versus perhaps maybe community hospitals. Early clinical research, early experiences are typically done at university settings, academic institutions, because of the disease state that would be seen in those facilities, versus if you were looking at a community hospital that may be more of a technology that is considered maybe second generation or third generation. And from a relationship standpoint or from the viewpoint of what attracts us to an academic center or to a researcher at a university is, again, what are their passion, what their interest is, how does it line up within our business units. Sometimes those business units may not exist and so it really comes down to where the medical community is going with diseases. It also may be based upon prevalence and a particular country, so maybe the work that we’re doing in the United States may look very different than maybe the interactions that we have in Japan or China or Australia.
So to kind of give a kind of a snapshot of what might be the scope and the range of a clinical project that we might work on with an academic center or a university center is it could be as small as one patient maybe or single digits to on the order of participating in a multi-center, multi-country clinical study, so it really runs that very full spectrum. If you’re looking at a situation where only that particular university or that academic center is participating in that clinical study, of course you would think it would be a smaller number, but we’ve seen some that may be upwards of 20, 30, 40 patients, but again it’s based on what’s the patient condition and what’s the frequency that would be seen in that particular facility.
This interview is from the UIDP module, Partnering with Industry: Best Practices. Download the complete module here:
Download the first module in this series, Compliance, here: