Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development does research on drug development and publishes regular reports on drug development. The reports are primarily research conducting by the Center on the current trends in drug development, meetings, forums, courses and discussions. They do not come up with novel methods for drug development but rather act as facilitators.
They also publish yearly outlook reports and their 2013 report is as conventional as it gets:
Research Requires Partnering agreements; Regulatory will rely on analytical tools; Biotech needs funding; Cost of drug is important and CRO will be part of drug development for costs.
However, in 2010 they had done an interesting survey wherein they had surveyed drug companies on the use of Biomarkers and targeted therapies. Almost all the companies were using these tools, but the interesting part was that in the preclinical area the Biomarkers were being used by 58% of the compounds in development, whereas in Phase 1-2 it declined to 50% and Phase 3, it was just 34%. This implies that the biomarker readouts are getting rapidly incorporated into drug development. The future outlook for any CRO therefore is to start offering Biomarker services. This has to be carefully analyzed since anything can be considered a Biomarker the way the CRO companies see it.
Within Biomarker space, the most development has been in Oncology, with the Cardiovascular, CNS and Immunology areas being behind. Thus, if you are a CRO, you would start offering assays for Oncology related areas such as Akt, PI3-kinase or any cell growth parameter.