At the beginning of 2025, AMRC set out to champion the multisite clinical research corporation (MCRC) model and to ensure that Sponsors, CROs, policymakers, and the wider industry understood its advantages. That work focused on the structural challenges facing clinical research, including
investigator and coordinator burnout, fragmented site infrastructure, increasing protocol complexity, and the growing burden of data management, and made the case that MCRCs are uniquely positioned to address them.
Throughout 2025, AMRC deepened this work through extensive engagement with industry stakeholders and original research, published in its whitepaper: The MCRC Advantage: Making the case for consolidation and consistency in clinical trials. That research showed that the industry largely understands the MCRC
model and recognizes its strengths. Sponsors and CROs consistently described MCRCs as capable of delivering on the metrics they say matter most to them, including speed, consistency, reliability, and operational performance.
However, this work also revealed a more subtle and persistent challenge. Despite acknowledging strong performance, Sponsors and CROs do not consistently perceive MCRCs as the highest-quality providers of clinical research, particularly when compared with academic medical centers. In many cases, MCRCs were
rated as performing on a par with models that are regarded as high quality, yet this performance did not always translate into the same perception of quality. Long standing assumptions and narrow proxies, often centered on individual credentials or institutional reputation, continue to shape how quality is judged.
Addressing this disconnect now sits at the heart of AMRCʼs advocacy. The challenge is no longer demonstrating that MCRCs can deliver the outcomes the industry values. It is ensuring that those outcomes are recognized as indicators of quality.
