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

Chi Heem Wong; Kien Wei Siah; Andrew W Lo

We plot the number of development programs known to start in each month from January 2000 through December 2019 in Figure 1 . There are 1,838 and 706 industrysponsored and non-industry-sponsored vaccine development programs, respectively, and, 3,851 and 2,978 industry-sponsored and non-industry-sponsored non-vaccine drug development programs targeting infectious diseases, respectively. As can be seen from Figure 1a , the number of industry-sponsored clinical programs attempting to treat infectious diseases is often greater than the number of vaccine development programs. The gap between the number of programs initiated for each development type seems to have increased between January 2000 and May 2014 before declining (see Section A7 for a more detailed analysis). We see a precipitous fall in the number of infectious disease treatment development programs initiated between late 2018 and mid-2019, which is likely to be related to declining investment in the research and development (R&D) of novel antibiotics, 8 Apr 2020 © 2020 by Wong, Siah, and Lo Page 4 of 25 All Rights Reserved precipitated by the closure of antibiotics biotechnology firms and the withdrawal of pharmaceutical companies from the antibiotics business (Hu, 2018; Langreth, 2019) .