In recent years, we have seen renewed and intensified efforts to make clinical development more patient centric and reduce the cost of the development process. The scarcity of patients with rare diseases, and the ethical concerns raised when gravely ill patients are enrolled in a placebo arm, have further highlighted the need to modernize approaches to drug development.

With cancer accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020 and 28 million new cases of cancer expected every year by 2040, the speed at which new treatments reach patients must accelerate.

We published the first edition of our Digital Patient Profile catalog last week, to give the industry access to a granular breakdown of patient populations for 28 key disease indications, derived from analysis of patient data in the industry’s largest clinical trial database. This includes 11 oncology indications and other prevalent diseases including Alzheimer’s, COVID-19 and Crohn’s disease.

The clinical development sector is highly sensitive to external events for two main reasons. One, because of the many moving parts involved – from patients, clinicians, sponsors, regulators and supply chain partners. And two, the fact that it is global in nature – often involving people and materials from many different countries and regions. In the end, we want our innovative medicines to benefit all patients, regardless of where they reside.

Before heading to SCOPE 2023 this month, we released our latest analysis investigating enrollment data from 173 cancer clinical trials over the last three years. Our analysis uncovered chronic challenges in clinical development, finding that 2,298 of 11,826 investigator sites (nearly one in five) have only enrolled a single patient.