Evolution of Clinical Trials - Part III

Clinical trials are a vast domain of research with lots of areas and topics to explore. This series of blogs started with a general overview of the Clinical trials space "Clinical Trials And Their Evolution" followed by the next one "Clinical Trials: Profound Insight into Top 5 Therapeutic Areas" giving details on specific topics such as therapeutic areas. In this blog, we give you insights into some more important aspects, such as enrollments and recruiting status of the clinical trials.

1. Percentage Enrollments in Therapeutic Areas

Fig: 1(a)

Fig: 1(b)

The above treemaps show the share of enrollments claimed by a particular therapeutic area. Evidently, Oncology has had a major share of the enrollments over the past decade, but when we look at the recent three years the enrollment share for infectious diseases has increased at a rapid rate.

One of the major reasons behind the rise in enrollments of infectious diseases in the past years is the outbreak of the diseases like Ebola, Zika, dengue, Middle East respiratory syndrome, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and influenza and the looming threat of rising antimicrobial resistance. Additionally, the rise in cases of Covid-19 has led to research being started in the area leading to more and more enrollments in recent years.

Another interesting point to note is the rise in enrollment share of Urology in recent years. The reason being an increased number of trials have started their enrollments in recent years and have not reached their final conclusion or have been discontinued. This shows the pseudo growth in enrollment in therapeutic areas in recent years.

This is how the clinical trials have been affected, and different therapeutic areas have shown growth or decline in enrollments based on various factors in the past decade.

2. Number of Trials by Therapeutic Area and Status

Fig: 2(a)

Fig: 2(b)

From the above bar graph(2a), we can see that in the past decade, the majority of trials, irrespective of the therapeutic areas, are under “completed” status. But when we look at the past three years, the majority of the trials have their status “recruiting” this aligns with the rapid growth of new trials in the past years, as discussed in our last blog “, Clinical Trials: Profound Insight into Top 5 Therapeutic Areas”.

One of the major factors for the majority of trials being “Completed” when we look at the past decade is the fact that around 60% of the trials were registered in the last 4-5 years, and the data that is being considered is for the historic trials that were registered prior the current decade but got completed in the current decade. This aligns with our findings from the first blog on clinical trials, “Clinical Trials And Their Evolution”.

Conclusion

We can conclude that the rise of infectious diseases has led to an increase of trials in the therapeutic area in turn leading to an increase in the share of enrollments. More trials are either in the recruiting or active phase, which leads to the fact that more and more research is being done in this space in recent years.