Career in clinical research

A graduate in life sciences or medical sciences is often at cross roads after completion of his/her degree. Many of them are not confident of their career and are anxious about their next move. They are often undecided on whether they should pursue a postgraduation in the same subject, prepare for foreign university exams, accept jobs offered with a decent salary irrespective of the nature of the job or try something different that is more challenging and satisfying.

There is also a category of students who are neither content with their graduation nor happy with the type of jobs offered to them. With the rising cost and competition, they are also not confident of pursuing post graduation in the main stream. It is this category of students, mostly venturing into trying something more challenging. In such a scenario, advertisements like 'Clinical research the emerging career option for lifesciences, dental and medical graduates', will certainly stimulate the students to consider clinical research as their destination. Furthermore, the terms Clinical and Research makes this field an attractive option. For many of the science graduates aspiring for growth, research is a boon because science and research are inseparable. When research offers an attractive salary too, guardians and parents are obviously drawn towards the field. The journey of exploration thus begins.

The clinical research team

At the Sponsor/Contract (Clinical) Research organisations (clinical research organisations are independent private companies to whom the sponsor sometimes outsources the clinical trial projects): Clinical Research Associate, Clinical Trial Administrator, Project Manager, Medical Writer, Quality Assurance Manager/ Eexecutive, Medical Advisor (These positions are exclusively for medical professionals, the rest are available for any lifesciences graduate/post graduates), Medical Monitor, Data Entry Operator, Data Manager, Data Validator, Bio-statistician, Manager- Regulatory Affairs.

At the Clinical trial site

Principal Investigator, Co-investigator, Clinical Research Co-ordinator, other hospital staff as per requirement

Companies into clinical research Sponsor companies: Johnson & Johnson, Biocon, GlaxoSmithKline Beecham, Allergan, Astra Zeneca, Ranbaxy Laboratories, Nicholas Piramal, Dr.Reddys Laboratories, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer etc.

CROs: Quintiles, Manipal Acunova, ICON International, Clintec, Clinigene International, Accenture, Paraxel, Asian Clinical trials, Paragon, etc.

Hospitals : St.Johns Hospital, M S Ramiah Memorial Hospital, Kidwai Memorial Hospital, Bangalore Institute of Oncology, Bangalore Diabetes Hospital, Wockhardt Hospital, Apollo Hospitals etc.

Information technology and clinical research

Information technology has been a boon to the clinical research industry. The software programmes such as Oracle data base helps the organisations to effectively manage huge amount of clinical trial data. Since we have several thousands of patient's data using software makes the job easy andgenerate high quality analysis. Clinical data management has thus emerged as one of the important off shoot of clinical research. There are many other applications of computers in clinical research.