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Research Development & Clinical Trials Competitors Collaborate To Train Asian Workers C By Cathy Yarbrough, contributing editor ompeting pharmaceutical companies typically don't share with each other. An exception is the Asia Training Consortium (ATC), whose members share their best practices in employee training to address a common challenge: preparing their Asian workers to manage the clinical trials that the companies plan to sponsor in the part of the world that is widely regarded as having the greatest potential for economic growth for the pharmaceutical industry. By sharing resources and expertise, Merck, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Pfizer, and the other multinational ATC member companies are not only cutting their costs for training workers but also are standardizing the knowledge and skillset required for clinical trial associates, clinical project managers, and clinical research managers in Asia. The collaboration extends from the design of the curricula to teaching the courses. In Shanghai, China, a recent ATC class on the Foundations of Clinical Project Management was attended by Astellas Pharma employees, taught by a Merck trainer and held at a Novartis facility. Frequently the attendees at an ATC class represent multiple companies. This nonproprietary approach to training achieves the economies of scale that reduce each company's training cost per employee, said John Constantine, chairman of the board of ATC and executive director & dean of the Merck Polytechnic Institute, the pharmaceutical company's training and development program for R&D; staff. 46 LifeScienceLeader.com The ATC was founded in 2012 because Constantine and his counterparts at other major pharmaceutical companies and multinational CROs had something in common: each was paying 20 times more for training a new employee in Asia than for training a new recruit in North America and Western Europe. Because the companies viewed their curricula as proprietary, they had to pay the total cost for each class, from the trainer's salary to the rental of the classroom and audiovisual equipment. "Even if the company had only five employees to train, it was paying the same amount of money that it would have spent if the classroom was full with 25 people," said Constantine. GOAL: REDUCE TRAINING COSTS The excessive costs of training Asian employees clashed with the belt-tightening occurring industrywide. To avoid less than optimal class sizes, some of the companies were infrequently holding training classes. As a result, some employees were not quickly trained to work in clinical trial management. When Merck, other companies, and CROs began to establish footholds in China and other Asian countries, they soon found that the region, unlike North America and Western Europe, did January 2014 not have a large cadre of professionals experienced in clinical trial management. "The basic skills of clinical trial management are not taught at universities in Asia," said Constantine. "Most of the people whom we are hiring in Asia are straight out of university. They are very eager to learn, very education-oriented, and ambitious. But they don't know basic good clinical practice (GCP)." Constantine helped establish ATC after joining Merck in 2008 to head the company's then new R&D; staff training institute. "Soon after I arrived, Merck announced it would focus its growth in clinical trials primarily in the Asian market," he said. As a result, Constantine changed his focus from North America and Western Europe to China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. During his first trip to China, whose large population has made it the primary market in Asia for the pharmaceutical industry, Constantine discovered that the CROs and other pharma companies that also were building a presence in the region shared Merck's lack of economies of scale in the training of Chinese workers to help manage clinical trials. Constantine took advantage of the