This page is a companion to an article published in STAT News, where I describe the value of taking a “bird’s eye perspective” on the clinical trial enterprise.

In December 2018, I downloaded data on all of the clinical trial registration records from 10 large pharmaceutical companies and AERO graphed them all together—by trial start date on the x-axis, and disease/condition of interest on the y-axis. The resulting figure, which includes more than 13,000 trials, is below.

Each bubble in the figure corresponds to a trial. The bubble color corresponds to the company; its size corresponds to the number of human subjects enrolled. Bubble shape indicates the trial’s current status, e.g., circles are completed trials; triangles are still active.

You can interact with the figure by mousing-over any bubble to see more information about the study. You can also click on any bubble to open the trial’s registration page on ClinicalTrials.gov.

For more on my interpretation of the figure, please do check out the piece at STAT. Or if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page (it’s a long way down there!), I describe some of the technical details about how this figure is produced.