About ACS

Vision and Founders

In 1999 Associate Professor Richard Robson founded Christchurch Clinical Studies Trust (CCST) to assist local and international pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies meet the expanding requirement for high quality, cost-effective early-phase drug development. CCST has been extremely successful completing more than 100 studies to date.

Following requests from Sponsors for increased capacity to run early-phase studies in New Zealand, the decision was taken to site a similar research facility in Auckland, New Zealand's largest city. In 2006 Dr Robson founded Auckland Clinical Studies (ACS) in cooperation with Associate Professor Ed Gane, an Auckland City Hospital hepatologist and research clinician and Mr David Cranna, an Auckland business consultant. Profile of founders can be seen by clicking on "Staff and Consultants".

The Service

ACS provides high quality, cost-effective, Phase I and II clinical research to local and international pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. ACS works in cooperation with CCST and conducts studies for its own Sponsors. ACS conducts healthy volunteer and patient studies; we work across all specialty areas but have a particular focus on liver impairment. The common theme for service provision is excellence of study and quality assurance at a competitive cost.

Why use ACS?

  • Auckland is New Zealand’s largest city and has a patient/volunteer regional catchment population of around 2 million

  • ACS is situated directly opposite Auckland’s leading tertiary referral hospital, Auckland City Hospital (ACH) and has access to a full range of medical specialities and LabPLUS, ACH's premier medical laboratory

  • Auckland is fortunate in having many clinical research groups in most therapeutic disciplines associated with the Auckland School of Medicine and Auckland’s major tertiary hospitals. These researchers are fully supportive and keen to participate in joint ventures and recruit patients for Phase I and II studies

  • ACS is within walking distance of New Zealand’s major university, the University of Auckland; many of the students are willing to participate in healthy volunteer studies. ACS now has more than 2,000 names on its volunteer data-base

  • Quality assurance is an integral part of ACS. Standard Operating Procedures have been adopted from CCST and modified for use in the Auckland unit. ACS has been subject to a number of Sponsor audits without significant findings. We have also had a number of successful qualification audits and pre-placement visits as well as a Regulatory Authority inspection

  • The favourable New Zealand environment enables us to offer timely and quality services at a competitive price