Sponsors
The sponsor is the company that is sponsoring the study. In most cases, the company is a pharmaceutical company. When you participate in a research study, you will take drugs from major companies you’ve heard of and from smaller companies all over the world that you never knew existed. Companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis and Schering-Plough all use clinics to test their drugs. There are hundreds of other companies you will see as well. Take a look at the wikipedia entries for the above companies and chances are that you may have done a study involving one of their drugs most likely as a reference product or complying drug. When a clinic conducts a study for a sponsor, there will usually be representatives for the sponsor present for the first does of a study and various points throughout the study. You will occasionally see clinic executives giving tours of the facilities while your in-house to potential sponsors. There is typically no interaction between the sponsors and the volunteer research subjects. The sponsor reps are merely there to see that the study is being carried out according to protocol. While you should always be following the rules of the study and the clinic, it is especially important to do so while sponsors are around as THEY are the ones paying you! If they see that the subjects are not following the protocol of the study, they can stop the study and move it to another research clinic in which case the clinic lose business and in turn reduces the amount of studies available to you. So, to wrap things up, the sponsor is the invisible force behind the study and you should respect the sponsor as they not only pay you but are trying to get new drugs into the market place for benefit of countless people in need.
Tags: clinical research, drugs, sponsor, sponsors, studies, study, trial, trials
