Contract research organization
type of healthcare company
In the life sciences, a contract research organization or clinical research organization (CRO) is a company that provides support to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries in the form of research services outsourced on a contract basis. A CRO may provide such services as biopharmaceutical development, biological assay development, commercialization, clinical development, clinical trials management, pharmacovigilance, outcomes research, and real world evidence.
CROs are designed to reduce costs for companies developing new medicines and drugs in niche markets. They aim to simplify entry into drug markets, and simplify development, as the need for large pharmaceutical companies to do everything ‘in house’ is now redundant. CROs also support foundations, research institutions, and universities, in addition to governmental organizations (such as the NIH, EMA, etc.).
Many CROs specifically provide clinical-study and clinical-trial support for drugs and/or medical devices. However, the sponsor of the trial retains responsibility for the quality of the CRO's work. CROs range from large, international full-service organizations to small, niche specialty groups. CROs that specialize in clinical-trials services can offer their clients the expertise of moving a new drug or device from its conception to FDA/EMA marketing approval, without the drug sponsor having to maintain a staff for these services.
Organizations who have had success in working with a particular CRO in a particular context (e.g.
“Contract research organization” enters the record as type of healthcare company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Contract, research and organization can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q760102. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Contract research organization” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.