India has pipped China to become Asia's most popular destination for conducting clinical trials. According to the Planning Commission, around 139 new trials were outsourced to India recently compared to 98 in China.

I'm not sure if this is a long-term trend or what, but this article from The Times of India, if nothing else, reflects the competition in the market. This news piece includes the following statements:

In comparison to China, India strictly follows ethical guidelines. (that's gotta hurt)

India has a larger number of doctors with a far better reputation than their Chinese counterparts. (tough talk)

OK, those were quotes, so they were inherently subjective. The more neutral generalizations included the following:

Factors such as a diverse genetic pool, large patient pool, drug naive population, competent medical professionals, high quality hospitals where trials can be undertaken and low cost of services have stimulated the flow of clinical research to India.

Sounds a lot like the situation here, at least to me. I find it interesting that "drug naive population" is a factor. Is that industry lingo for something or does it really mean what it sounds like (i.e., kinda bad)? Maybe it's the latter – I stumbled across this post on the Global Bioethics Blog, which was, in part, a response to the article in The Times:

Last year, Jill Fisher at Arizona State University wrote a very interesting article on the concept of 'ready-to-recruit' populations for biomedical research for the journal Qualitative Inquiry (subscription required, goddammit). The term 'ready-to-recruit' is a concept used in the pharmaceutical industry to describe populations that do not really have an attractive alternative to joining a clinical trial, because they live in circumstances of poverty, where there are few doctors, where local medical care is sub-standard and so on. Fisher prefers the more ethically charged term 'ready to consent' to describe these populations, because they are not just easy to access, but gaining their consent is a piece of cake. Practically all you need to do is ask. Socio-economic forces do the rest. Which is to say: the whole consent process is a bit of a farce.

My legal work on these issues pretty much ends at the point when an agreement is executed (in the old days, when a permit was issued), so I never really get involved at the research institute level. If this is a real trend (towards India and away from China), I would like to know what's driving it.