Gambling with the economics of a table that stretches to the edges of the globe, about a decade ago two men from Downingtown and Phoenixville strategically placed their chips on the risky emergence of outsourced clinical trials — inside the United States rather than overseas.

“We were going out on a limb,” Y-Prime Co-Founder and Executive Vice President Jaime Cook said in in a recent Philly.com report. “But we were young. Probably cocky, too.”

Neither he nor fellow Co-Founder Shawn Blackburn have been disappointed by that bet, which has returned a “cutting-edge contract research organization with nearly $10 million in revenue, 65 employees and 56 clients,” the article stated.

Their Malvern-based 2006 startup is among the early pioneers of a CRO (contract research organization) movement that has brought more than 700 such medical research and development companies to Pennsylvania alone between 2008 and 2013.

“They definitely have a leg up on their competition because they were in the game much earlier,” life sciences trade association

Pennsylvania Bio President and CEO Christopher Molineaux added. “… These companies pride themselves, and build their reputations and their businesses, on being objective while providing this critical service. As important, the sponsor companies have an incentive to use objective CROs because it allows them to fully understand the potential, or lack of potential, of their product. The companies want to succeed fast or fail fast and minimize their spending.”

That appeal loses some of its luster for struggling startups that can be jostled around when higher-priority projects come in, but it’s still a better deal than going it alone.

“Smaller pharma can’t justify the costs to handle these kinds of tests,” President and CEO J. Kevin Buchi of Y-Prime client TetraLogic Pharmaceuticals Corp. in Malvern noted. “The logistics associated with it can be quite daunting. If you’ve got a good vendor, you’re often better off.”

Read more about Y-Prime’s decade of success and the current CRO environment on Philly.com here.