The evilness of averages
Next time you hear an average — ask what is the variance.
Little is routinely disclosed about the costs of the pivotal clinical trials — let alone cost variance.
The conventional wisdom is that clinical trials are well — really expensive. A popular estimate is that Phase 3 pharma trials cost in excess of $2.5BN.
However — a recent Tufts survey estimates the average cost of Phase III trials as $255 million in 2014 dollars. That sounds cheap. But wait. What about the variance?
A recent paper on BMJ Open Pharmacology and therapeutics
investigated the variation in pivotal trial costs.
The number of patients required to establish efficacy varied widely from 4 to 8,442. The number of visits varied from 2–166 and is wildly dependent on the therapeutic.
So — I guess maybe it depends.
See the original research here: Variation in the estimated costs of pivotal clinical benefit trials supporting the US approval of new therapeutic agents, 2015–2017: a cross-sectional study
