As part of a series of white papers tracking clinical trial activity around the world, GlobalData covered 14,190 trials initiated in 2016 across all diseases and phases that had a start date between 1 January and 31 December 2016.

GlobalData analysed the number of trials carried out by industry and non-industry sponsors and determined the top sponsors and contract research organisations (CRO) involved in these clinical trials, as well as the top investigational drugs.

Non-industry trials outnumbered industry-sponsored trials across the yearly period (Figure 1). Clinical trials were more frequently run in single countries than across multinational regions and the five major therapy areas were oncology, central nervous system, cardiovascular, infectious disease, and metabolic disorders.