ASH Clinical News FINAL_ACN_3.14_FULL_ISSUE_DIGITAL | Page 16

Editor’s Corner Solving the Contract Research Agonization Problem I The content of the Editor’s Corner is the opinion of the authors and does not represent the official position of the American Society of Hematology unless so stated. N THE JUNE 2017 ISSUE of ASH Clinical News, we published an editorial calling into question some of the purposes and practices of contract research organizations (CROs), which came into existence in the 1980s and are used by much of the pharmaceutical industry to outsource research regulatory requirements. Although CROs – considered specialists in the day-to-day minutiae of clinical trial conduct – should be the epitome of high-quality data