According to GlobalData, industry-sponsored trials have increased from 7,721 in 2016 to 13, 685 in 2025. This growth over the past decade, coupled with the emergence of more complex trials and therapies, globalisation and decentralisation, greater regulatory and quality expectations, and costs and timeline pressures on trial providers, has resulted in outsourcing logistics to third parties to support each stage of a trial.
To help reduce workloads, mitigate risks, and improve operational efficiency, logistics companies offer services that manage the supply and distribution, such as sourcing, labelling, storing, and distributing medicinal products and related materials. However, the logistics chain is a major source of risk in today’s clinical-trial research, with challenges such as temperature excursions, tight dosing windows, potential product integrity failures, and limited patient availability, so choosing the wrong logistics partner can introduce hidden issues that only become evident during audits or through unexpected incidents.
Industry analyses and inspection trends indicate that such logistics-related risks frequently translate into protocol deviations, site-level disruptions, and increased audit exposure for organisations responsible for trial oversight. While these impacts are often managed by CROs, the consequences extend across the broader clinical trial ecosystem, affecting sponsors, investigational sites, and other partners involved in study execution.
To safeguard product and data integrity, and most importantly, patient safety, best-in-class logistics providers make clinical-trial supply chains “compliance-first”, mitigating risks by ensuring every step of the trial process is transparent, traceable, and adheres to regulatory obligations.
On Wednesday 28th January, OCASA, a leading global provider of logistics solutions to the life sciences industry, is hosting a webinar titled From Protocol to Patient: Enabling Reliable Clinical Distribution. This webinar will explore topics related to GMP, GDP, and GxP requirements and how they apply to storage, distribution, and cold-chain management, whilst highlighting the costly blind spots that directly threaten study integrity and patient safety.
The session will feature insights from OCASA’s Steven Chavez, Senior Vice President and Head of Global Sales, and Laura Navarro, Senior Operations Manager for EMEA, and provides essential information for clinical trials and life sciences operations on GMP-compliant logistics support services.
To register, please click here.
