Clinical Intelligence Analytics - Primary Sponsor

Primary Sponsor Dashboard

Primary Sponsor dashboard (Figure 5.1) provides us insights into the study activities by primary or lead study sponsors. Primary sponsor is an important stakeholder in the clinical trials that has the primary responsibility of initiating, study design and study conduct. In simple terms, we can say that the primary sponsor is the owner of the clinical study. The sponsor can be an individual, a company or an institution, and they can be from industry (commercial) like pharmaceutical or Biotech companies or public non-industry (non-commercial) institutions like government or research institutions. 

 In this dashboard we will look at various aspects of study activities of sponsors.

Figure 5.1

1. How many sponsors have registered clinical trials in the US? How many of them are from the Industry (Commercial)? How many studies have they registered? For how many studies did the sponsors from commercial sector have posted the results for the studies?
The tiles on the top provides few sponsors related summary metrics to answer some of the questions mentioned above.
There are a total of 313,345 studies registered by 28,068 lead or primary sponsors in the US till date. Out of 28,068 sponsors, 8,717 sponsors are from commercial sector with 81,169 studies registered and the remaining 19,351 sponsors are from non-commercial sector with 232,176 studies registered. 
There are 4,545 sponsors with at least one study result posted and 1,680 of them are from Industry. 

2. What percentage of studies were registered by sponsors from industry as compared to the non-industry? 
About 26% of studies were sponsored from the industry or commercial sector. A small percentage 3.31% and 1.16% are contributed by NIH (National Institute of Health) and US government respectively. The raw data did not provide further classification into the non-industry sector. The data is transformed to figure out if the non-industry sponsor is a Hospital or University/Institute/School. The shows that Universities have been a major source of sponsored studies with almost 45% share and Hospitals having 9% share.

3. What's the growth in number of studies sponsored by study as compared to the non-industry sector over the last few years?
Except 2008 and 2014, the number of studies registered by Industry sponsors have largely remained stable around 5,500 mark. In contrast, the studies registered by non-industry sponsors have grown rapidly. Notice the size of the steps in the chart. Also notice the increasing gap between the two lines.

4. What percentage of registered studies have some participation from industry?
The pie chart named Industry Participation shows the share of studies where either the primary sponsor is from industry or at least one of of the collaborators is from industry. About 33% of the studies has some participation from industry.
 
5. Who are the top performing industry sponsors?
The tabular chart shows the primary sponsors from industry sector ranked based on the number of studies registered. The chart also display metrics like number of countries they have recruited patients, number of recruiting facilities, studies in completed state, studies where the recruitment has not yet started, studies that are currently recruiting and studies where results are posted. The success ratio compares the studies that were registered minus the studies that have not yet started or are in progress with the completed studies.
GlaxoSmithKline(GSK) is the top performer with 3351 studies and 91% success ratio followed by Pfizer and Novartis. Pfizer has recruited patients in 105 countries. Sanofi is another sponsor that recruited patients in 107 countries. 

6. Who are the top performing sponsors from non-commercial sector?
National Institute of Health Clinical Center, National Cancer Institute and M.D Anderson Cancer Institute are top 3 performers. The non-industry sponsors have recruited patients in fewer countries as compared to the top sponsors from commercial sectors.
The dashboards can answer many other questions by simply slicing and dicing the data by different dimensions.
If you get any questions in your mind that you want to share, please post them in comments and I will try to address them.
Till next time.