Nov 1, 2007: China’s leading CRO Excel PharmaStudies in the last eight years has grown into a full service CRO providing comprehensive regulatory, clinical research and quality assurance services in the areas of clinical drug development, phase I-IV, bioequivalence studies, clinical monitoring, project management, patient recruitment, data management, biostatistics analysis, translation, medical report writing and other related services. Headquartered in Beijing, Excel has established business offices in the US (San Francisco) and Europe (Cologne, Germany), and has created partnerships with companies in Korea, Taiwan and Australia. The company aims to move from being China’s leading CRO to Asia’s leading CRO. Some excerpts from an interview with Mr William Xiong, CEO of Excel PharmaStudies.

What kind of contract services do you offer to your clients?
As a CRO, Excel provides customer-focused, regulatory compliant clinical services based on strong ethics, mutual trust and personnel empowerment.  Since its inception in 1999, Excel PharmaStudies Inc. has become recognized as a leading provider in China of high quality, GCP compliant project solutions. Our expertise stems from the depth and ethical/industry experience of our personnel resources. We are extremely customer-focused with over 90 percent of our customers re-engaging us for additional project assignments. At project inception, we jointly determine the performance criteria and deliver against study endpoints, and specifications throughout the clinical project life cycle. We are experienced within Chinese SFDA and FDA-regulated environments for clinical drug and medical device developments. Comprised of a core group of professionals, from experienced medical doctors, industry-experienced clinical, regulatory, and quality assurance experts to project managers, our team is fully qualified to provide to clients’ clinical project assignments.

How challenging is the CRO business and what is Excel doing to meet those challenges?
As the total cost of new drug development has doubled since 1997, and process of that development has also been prolonged due to increasingly stringent regulations. Multinational pharmaceutical and medical device companies are dramatically increasing demand for pre-clinical and clinical research services. Conversely, however, there are also an increasing number of CROs throughout the world, and this has raised the level of competition and reduced profit margins for all CROs. The challenge that Excel faces every day is tough combination for new business while still maintaining sufficient profits to grow the business.

As of today, about 130 clinical trials (all phases) have been successfully conducted and 200 regulatory approvals were granted to Excel.

As one of the few CROs in China using Oracle and SAS for clinical data management and biostatistics analysis, our biometrics services are in compliance with US FDA 21 CFR Part 11 requirements.

Our clients currently include most of the top multinational pharmaceutical, device and biotech companies.

The strategy for Excel is clear in that we expand our businesses in a steady, healthy, and fast pace in China and ultimately worldwide.

What is the strategy for the next five years?
Our next five-year plan is to grow from the leading Chinese CRO into the leading Asian CRO.  This expansion will be by a combination of: organic growth, acquisitions and building wide-spectrum alliances with leading international partners.