Drug Success Rates Remain Low
Applied Clinical Trials
It now costs more than $1 billion and takes more than seven years, on average, to conduct clinical trials and win regulatory approval to market a new drug. Not only are development costs high and rising steadily, but also only one out of every six self-originated drugs developed successfully completes clinical testing and obtains marketing approval.
It now costs more than $1 billion and takes more than seven years, on average, to conduct clinical trials and win regulatory approval to market a new drug. Not only are development costs high and rising steadily, but also only one out of every six self-originated drugs developed successfully completes clinical testing and obtains marketing approval.
New Drug Development Still Risky
This 16% overall success rate—gleaned from the portfolios of the top 50 largest global pharmaceutical companies—has remained relatively constant despite efforts on the part of sponsors to improve the overall quality, predictability, and scope of their clinical research data. Although overall success rates have not changed substantially during the past decade, some trends in phase transition probabilities have been observed: Clinical transition probabilities between Phase i and Phase II and between Phase II and Phase III have gotten lower, suggesting that drug sponsors are becoming more aggressive about terminating unpromising candidates, enabling them to redirect increasingly scarce R&D resources to more promising drug development programs.—Tufts Center for Drug Development, http://csdd.tufts.edu.
Putting Collective Insights Into Action to Advance Cancer Care: Key Examples From ASCO 2025
June 27th 2025At ASCO 2025, clinical operations leaders gained critical insights into how AI tools, bispecific antibodies, and evolving treatment paradigms are reshaping trial design, endpoint selection, and patient stratification.
Unifying Industry to Better Understand GCP Guidance
May 7th 2025In this episode of the Applied Clinical Trials Podcast, David Nickerson, head of clinical quality management at EMD Serono; and Arlene Lee, director of product management, data quality & risk management solutions at Medidata, discuss the newest ICH E6(R3) GCP guidelines as well as how TransCelerate and ACRO have partnered to help stakeholders better acclimate to these guidelines.
Funding Cuts Threaten Diversity in Clinical Research
June 27th 2025In this video interview, Kyle McAllister, co-founder, CEO, Trially, discusses how recent federal funding cuts are likely to undermine research focused on underrepresented populations, and why long-term investment in community-based studies is essential to closing persistent health equity gaps.
