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The Phone Call That Changed Everything Part 4 – How a Financial Crisis Reshaped Clinical Research I still remember the date. 31 January 2013. The phone rang. It was a landline, back when most important business conversations still happened that way. On the other end was a manager from one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. We had worked together for years. At the time, Altiora ranked among their three largest regional CRO partners. Our inspections had been flawl

Nobody Teaches You How to Build a CRO Part 3 – Learning to Build a Company While Building an Industry When I founded Altiora in 2001, I wasn't only learning clinical research. I was learning how to build a company. Like most physicians, I had received years of medical education. What I had never been taught was how to hire people, lead teams, manage cash flow, negotiate contracts, build quality systems or create an organisation that clients could trust. Nobody teaches you tha

Technology Changed Everything. People Didn't. Part 2 – Why Clinical Research Is Still a Business Built on People. When I look back over the last twenty-five years, one thing becomes immediately obvious. Clinical research today is almost unrecognisable compared to the industry I entered in 1997. Back then, most documents were printed. Study files filled entire rooms. Monitoring reports and CRFs travelled by courier. Internet connections were slow enough to make downloading a p

Twenty-five years is far more than a business milestone. It represents thousands of working days, countless challenges, difficult decisions, shared successes and friendships that have shaped not only our company, but also our lives. Looking back, I realise that Altiora has never been built by one person. It has been built by every individual who chose to become part of this journey. Some stayed with us for many years. Some continued their careers elsewhere. But every one of y

What It Was Like Building a CRO When Clinical Research Barely Existed 25 years ago, starting a CRO in Croatia wasn't considered ambitious. It was considered impossible. When I entered clinical research in 1997, Good Clinical Practice (GCP) had only recently become the foundation of modern clinical trials. There were very few people in Croatia—or anywhere in the region—who had practical experience in clinical research. A handful of bioequivalence studies were being conducted a