There has been a clear spurt in the number of applications for clinical trials received by the Indian regulatory bodies during the last couple of years. The state of Gujarat, which contributes 42% of India's pharmaceutical turnover and 22% of India's pharmaceutical exports, offers several advantages over other states like large number of specialized hospitals to facilitate fast recruitment; upcoming training centers to provide qualified clinical trial professionals, excellent telecoms facilities for data transmission as required in e-clinical trials are some of the examples of these advantages.

Driven by new enterprise and innovation in recent years, the clinical research outsourcing industry in Gujarat is witnessing accelerated growth. The strong established base of traditional pharmaceutical industries and the recent government initiated support to Biotech industry has provided ideal environment and tremendous opportunities for Gujarat to foray into clinical research field.

A state with over 9000 government medical institutions, about 40,000 registered Doctors and many specialty hospitals has given a strong platform for successful operations of many CROs like Quintiles, Synchron, Lambda, Veeda, BA research, etc since 1998.

Moreover Gujarat being the only dry state in India becomes ideal location for conduct of bio equivalence studies for generic products which require recruiting healthy volunteers without alcohol abuse.

The hospitals such as Apollo, SAL Hospital, Sterling Hospital, Bankers Heart Hospital, G.E. Health Care, Fortis Hospital, Rajasthan hospital, and the Cardiology, Kidney and Cancer institutes from the Civil Hospital, Muljibhai Patel Urological Hospital at Nadiad, etc are specialised hospitals which are meeting recruitment targets for multicentric trials with desired GCP and other regulatory compliance.

Hospitals in Gujarat provide world class health facilities, zero waiting time and most importantly, reasonable medical cost in comparison to other states; hence Gujarat is becoming a preferred medical destination. This further increases the patient recruitment potential.

Gujarat, aiming to become clinical research & biotech hub of the country, has taken initiatives like setting up of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) dedicated to pharmaceutical sector which has attracted huge investments.

The state has many existing CROs investing on providing through training of Schedule 'Y' & GCP compliance to their employees. Moreover, to fulfil the state's & Nation's demand of qualified Clinical research professionals the Gujarat State Biotech Mission (GSBTM) in collaboration with a group of clinical research professionals has established Shivrath Centre of Excellence and Clinical Research which is the state's first private-public partnership (PPP) institute for clinical research.

In conclusion, the knowledge repository and the enabling infrastructure, coupled with other components of the public health infrastructure existing in Gujarat, would position the state favorably as a clinical research hub of the country.

(Dr Manish Harsh is head- Clinical Operations & Nisha Gupta is clinical monitoring manager, Synchron Research Services Pvt. Ltd.)