The challenges of collaboration between pharmaceutical companies and contract research organisations (CROs) are widely discussed across the industry. Ask leaders on either side of the partnership what challenges they encounter and the answers tend to converge: communication is inefficient, timelines slip, integrity is questioned, and quality can be inconsistent. These issues are real and they have been examined extensively.

What is discussed far less often, however, is a deeper, more structural problem, one that does not always manifest as an immediate failure. Instead, it steadily erodes research efficiency over time. It is a problem that becomes most visible in large, long-running collaborations and at precisely the moments when data-driven decisions matter most.

At the heart of many pharma-CRO tensions lies an uncomfortable reality: data sharing and data security are rarely
achieved simultaneously. In practice, organisations are forced to trade one for the other, either constraining access and slowing decision-making or widening sharing at the cost of long-term data control and protection.