How Australia’s Leading CRO Is Driving Biotech’s Acceleration From First-In-Human To Global Markets

A Partnership Built On Global Possibilities And Shared Values

In 2025, Harvill’s experience overseeing CROs through global expansion across Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe, and South America led him to take the helm at Avance Clinical, Australia’s leading CRO. Harvill cites Avance Clinical’s location as critical to its appeal: “Through getting to know Avance, I learned how important Australia is to the drug development ecosystem and acceleration of new therapies.” Australian clinical trial data contributes significantly to global drug approval, and Avance Clinical oversees approximately half of all trials run in the country. Furthermore, the CRO provides accessible routes to APAC expansion via site partnerships in South Korea and Taiwan and more broadly in the US.

But Harvill’s decision to join Avance Clinical was about more than the Australian Advantage — which includes rapid regulatory approval pathways for early-phase clinical research, a 43.5% tax rebate for trial costs, and world-leading scientific and medical research settings — it was also about the company’s commitment to supporting early-stage innovators.

His leadership values are closely aligned with Avance’s cultural ones: fairness, integrity, patient centricity, service, and high performance. He describes his long-term mantra, “The key to success in this industry is relationships with clients and your team — you are only as good as your reputation for delivery,” a mindset he will no doubt apply in his new role.

A Future Committed To Ongoing Excellence And Continued Expansion

Now, embarking on an era defined by these standards, Harvill and the Avance Clinical team have their sights set on both global growth and ongoing support of early-phase studies. Expect the following from Avance Clinical in the years to come:

• An ongoing commitment to being a first-in-class global provider to biotechs: Avance Clinical will continue to be an APAC-led company with growing operations in the U.S. and Europe to ensure access to the best sites and patient populations to support studies.
• Continued excellence in early-phase trials: Small biotechs must prioritize speed and right-first-time data. Avance Clinical’s Australia-based trials are a boon to small and mid-size companies striving to save money and maintain speed while procuring global-ready data from their target patient populations. Harvill’s team is adept at anticipating biotech needs and guiding them toward key milestones en-route to inflection points.
• Further expansion into Phase 2 and beyond: Avance Clinical supports sponsors beyond Phase 1 by providing long-term partnership as they move through to a final inflection point of licensing, selling, partnering, or taking therapies to market.
• Assembling world-class experts: Avance has invested in building Centers of Excellence for Oncology, Central Nervous System (CNS), and Renal to bring together a dedicated team of experts and industry-leading key opinion leaders (KOLs) and site networks to support patient studies in sub-specialties across the globe.

An Industry Sustained By Innovation

Harvill has witnessed the pharma industry’s responses to both the HIV/AIDS crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. From his vantage point, the continued acceleration of science and technology to support global health is a most exciting prospect. “The industry continues to expand at levels we’ve not seen before, conducting global research, identifying unmet needs, and delivering new therapies every day,” he explains. “AI is being used to rapidly accelerate the evolution of clinical research. Technology-enabled development alongside regulatory investment is supporting new therapies getting to market much quicker.”

So how, in a sea of tech-enabled CROs striving to support biotechs designing the next major drugs, does Avance Clinical deliver something indelible to their sponsors? Harvill puts it simply: “We stand out because we are genuinely passionate about where we are and what we do. We take pride in delivering the best for our biotech partners.”