discoveries magazine
Discoveries

Clinical Trials and Tribulations

Wonder drugs can transform lives when they manage to migrate out of the lab and into the medicine cabinet. But most new devices and medications don’t make it through the years of rigorous testing required to gain Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. Cedars-Sinai investigators tread the research path from idea to reality. Here, numbers tell the story of that difficult journey, and show how critical it is for more people to participate in clinical trials.

90

percent of potential drugs fail to gain FDA approval

4

percent of U.S. cancer patients join clinical trials

68

percent increase in active clinical trials at Cedars-Sinai over five years

40,835

Americans enrolled in clinical trials in 2016—only .01 percent of the population

50

percent of treatments are found ineffective in the last stage of testing