The CRO a sponsor chooses is more than a checkbox, it’s the beginning of a relationship. And making that call can mean the difference between sleepless nights and being able to close the laptop at the end of the day, knowing you’re in the right hands.
We spoke with Josh Martino of Kumquat Biosciences about what it’s been like to work with PSI CRO across multiple programs and through different companies. Thanks, Josh, for taking the time to chat with us.
Transcript
The reason why I’ve partnered, you know, with PSI across multiple programs, both really early stage, first in human programs all the way to late stage pivotal phase, three huge studies in a couple dozen countries globally across 3 or 4 regions. The reason why we partner with PSI is because we get both of those things.
We get the local expertise because of the broad presence, but we also get that really, really good customer service and the responsiveness. And it’s not, it’s not just saying, yeah, we hear you, cool. It’s understanding what we want, but why we’re asking for what we are asking for, why we’re pivoting, why we’re changing direction. It’s understanding that it’s knowing what we need and it’s sort of being able to provide the global effort around that.
So what we really like from PSI is the scalability, right? We can do small lots of protocol amendments, lots of changes, early phase stuff or the really big really important registration enabling trials, which all hands on deck, all eyes are on that study.
And we feel like, you know, PSI has everything under control and you know, puts together a really good team. And that’s the other thing we really love about PSI is sort of the employee retention. When you look at employee retention, and I said this earlier about post COVID, the great resignation, everybody’s leaving and bouncing around.
I mean, every big CRO partner was losing people left and right. It got so bad we had to start putting into our contracts that if key people left within six months of being assigned for reasons that weren’t ours, you know, we would ask for some kind of malice or penalty or something, right? Like we were trying to deter people from leaving because we just had everybody leaving the studies all the time at these big CR OS.
But PSI was able to show us they had retention, they had employee dedication, you know, had people staying at the company for like a really long time. And in this industry, you know, where even more than two years seems to be a long time. And PSI had a lot of employees that have been there 10 years or more. And we’re talking about the study teams, the Cras, the study manager level people.
And that said a lot to us as a sponsor about, well, why are they staying? They’re staying because of the leadership, they’re staying because of the supportive structure of the organization. And that means a lot to us because then if those people, you know, we’re dedicated enough to remain with the organization in a time when everybody else is just fleeing their jobs left and right to look for something better.
That put a lot of confidence in into, you know, into the relationship for us and that maybe, you know, the these folks will also give us the same amount of attention and the same amount of loyalty and we’ll be able to dedicate themselves to us. So that meant a lot as well.
So not only, you know, do we have great experiences working across early, middle and late phase and everything in between in US only to I think 24 countries globally, but we also have these good, these good relationships with people that stay at PSI for a long time. There’s a lot of retention and that’s very obvious because the expertise is really high.
