A typical Contract Research Organization, or CRO, will contract with companies in the pharma or biotech industry to help them design, manage, and analyze various aspects of clinical trials that are conducted to study the safety and efficacy of new drugs. Most small to medium-size CROs will typically grow until a point when owners or investors will look at selling to either private equity firms or a larger CRO. It’s a lucrative path, but it’s not the path of my Evergreen® company, Innovaderm.

I began my career as an academic researcher. Twenty-two years ago, I started Innovaderm, and five years later I left academia to devote my entire time to my company. We are a CRO that specializes in dermatology, and though our headquarters  is located in Canada, we also have employees in the U.S., Spain, India, and Poland. Like most CRO’s, we contract with pharma and biotech companies on studies, in our case involving treatment for diseases of the skin. A client may come to us with a drug they think may improve a certain disease like psoriasis. We might help them design the study, write the research protocol, obtain the proper approvals, manage the project, coordinate and monitor the sites conducting the study around the world, and have our biostatisticians and data managers analyze the data.