“I’ve banned the word ‘outsourcing’ from our organization,” says Merck Serono SA EVP and Head of Global Development and Medical Annalisa Jenkins. It seems like a strange thing to say, coming from someone who’d just crafted an extensive five-year clinical development agreement with Quintiles Transnational Holdings Inc., which bills itself as “the world’s largest provider of biopharmaceutical development and commercial outsourcing services.”
But Jenkins persists. It’s not outsourcing; rather, in an increasingly complex industry, organizations need to work together to address the...