CRO in India is a recent development,only a decade and half old.The first five years went mostly in capability building and also in trying to gain credibility.During this time the first few pharmaceutical and biotech companies ventured outside of USA and Europe to look for cost competitive services.The next ten years saw consolidation of relationship.The pharmaceutical companies in these ten years gained a fairly good idea on the capabilities of their service providers,and tried to set expectations accordingly.Most importantly,they gained confidence in terms of maintenance of confidentiality and IP protection of different providers.The collaborative partnership model which has gained significant popularity in recent times came out of three reasons:a) the pharmaceutical companies are more confident about the drug discovery capabilities of their service providers b) the global economic downturn helped them to preserve resources to push the existing,more matured candidates towards their logical conclusion while keeping the R&D pipeline unaffected and finally c) the service providers found it worthwhile to pursue a risk sharing model to get a bigger piece of the pie rather than mere service fees which slowly drying up,at least temporarily.However given that integrated drug discovery is a new phenomenon in India and VC funding is still very rare for these kinds of efforts the sustainability of this new business model will be challenged over the next few years.