Estimating Probabilities of Success of Clinical Trials for Vaccines and Other Anti-Infective Therapeutics

Chi Heem Wong; Kien Wei Siah; Andrew W Lo

We filter our data to include only trials that have been tagged by Citeline as being in the 'Infectious Disease' or 'Vaccines (Infectious Diseases)' therapeutic areas. The vaccine types and diseases are provided by the databases. The database encodes each unique triplet of trial identification number, drug, and disease as a data point. As such, a single trial can be repeated as multiple data points. Since the two therapeutic areas may overlap in data points, we define clinical trials that are involved in any vaccine development as part of a 'vaccine' development program. In addition, we process the data such that more specific diseases (e.g., rabies) can be identified instead of broad vaccine classes (e.g., vector-borne disease vaccines). Clinical trials that are not involved in any vaccine development program will be deemed to be part of a 'non-vaccine' drug development program. We derive 43,414 data points in total. We define an 'industry-sponsored' development program as one where there is at least one commercial company involved in any stage of clinical development. The complement-in which there is no commercial company involved in any stage of the vaccine or drug development program-shall be referred to as 'non-industry-sponsored'.