Vall d’Hebron Institute of Research (VHIR), international leader in the development of clinical trials, has opened this Monday an exclusive space of 625m2 for the Support Unit in Clinical Research (USIC). Located at the 13th floor of the Mother and Child building, it has 7 consulting rooms, an extraction room, a laboratory for sample management and temporal conservation and a temporal drug storage among other facilities to monitor and control external patients that take part in clinical trials. At the same time, the 13th floor will host the Academic Research Organisation (ARO), which will offer to researchers a complete package of management services, such as medical writing, administrative procedures for study approval, project management and monitoring, data management and statistical analysis of the results. To the inauguration ceremony have attended Antoni Andreu, director of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII), Mercedes Alfaro, director of the Instituto de Información Sanitaria del Ministerio de Sanidad, Política Social e Igualdad, Roser Fernández, general-secretary of the Departament de Salut de la Generalitat, and Gabriel Capellà, responsible of Research and Innovation of the Catalan government, together with managers of the hospital, members of the board of trustees and managers from the pharmaceutical industry.Whereas in Europe the average of clinical trials has decreased 25-30%, at VHIR have slightly increased. The new facilities could host nearly 350 clinical trials of phase II, III and IV and could attend 5,000 patients per year. At the present time, VHIR has nearly 600 clinical trials in course and important agreements with the main pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer, Sanofi, Bristol-Meyers Squibb and Quintiles.With this new infrastructure, USIC will ease the management of clinical research protocols in a more reliable, efficient and flexible way. These facilities not only will help researchers of consolidated groups, but also those groups that are growing. Simply actions, like an analytical control, which until now was done and scheduled following the routines of the Hospital, will be done in the same space, saving time and effort to researchers. This project started at the end of 2009 and the construction began on October 2011. 7 months ago, in January 2013, USIC moved to this floor and in the following days will start the nursing activity. ISCIII, through the European Funds FEDER, contributed with 930.000 euros to the remodeling of 13th floor, whereas the government of Spain, through the Ministerio de Sanidad, Política Social e Igualdad, funded 218,500 euros, and Caiber 85,000 euros.