To follow up an earlier posting from April 2, 2007 on  Outsourcing Trends in the Biotech Industry, a new report is out which provides more evidence that outsourcing is on the rise in across all of the life sciences industries.

Drugs-about.com News reported:

In EquaTerra’s newly-released Pulse Survey report covering the first quarter of 2007, the firm’s advisors cited pharmaceuticals as the leading vertical industry segment in terms of outsourcing demand. The report also found that outsourcing demand in the pharma industry has increased since the first quarter of 2006. . . .

The report also disclosed that there is far higher interest among pharmaceutical, life science, and biotech companies than among companies in general in expanding their current use of outsourcing. In this industry, 44 percent said they planned to expand outsourcing into new process areas – compared with 28 percent of companies overall. Also, 39 percent said they planned to expand outsourcing into new geographies or business units, compared with 30 percent of companies overall.

This report further bolsters the argument that outsourcing is going to become as widespread and important to the biotech and life sciences industries as it already is in the high tech world.   

Will outsourcing leave even more of a mark on the life sciences landscape than what we previously anticipated?  One can’t help but wonder if it will ultimately result in at the very least  the  modification of the current practices of certain companies, which current run early clinical trials in some of the same countries to which they are now outsourcing.