🙈Negative Results are Never Published

A global database of treatments and outcomes could provide information that could avoid massive waste on failed trials.

Selective publishing can prevent the rapid spread of beneficial treatments or interventions, but more commonly it means that bad news and failure of medical interventions go unpublished. Past analysis of clinical trials supporting new drugs approved by the FDA showed that just 43 percent of more than 900 trials on 90 new drugs ended up being published. In other words, about 60 percent of the related studies remained unpublished even five years after the FDA had approved the drugs for market. That meant physicians were prescribing the drugs and patients were taking them without full knowledge of how well the treatments worked.

This leads to a massive waste of money by other companies repeating the same research and going down the same dead-end streets that could have been avoided.

Cost Savings in Drug Development

Failed drug applications are expensive. A global database of treatments and outcomes could provide information that could avoid massive waste on failed trials.

• A 10% improvement in predicting failure before clinical trials could save $100 million in development costs.

• Shifting 5% of clinical failures from Phase III to Phase I reduces out-of-pocket costs by $15 to $20 million.

• Shifting failures from Phase II to Phase I would reduce out-of-pocket costs by $12 to $21 million.