Seoul ranks first in the world in number of clinical trials per city. It is meaningful that the city shows a significant gap with Houston of U.S., which took second place in the world.
The size of global clinical trials has been considerably falling due to a decrease in new drug candidates, a sharp increase in research and development investment costs caused by a loss of new drug development efficiency and stronger standards of clinical trials and new drug licenses by health authorities in each country. In fact, the number of global clinical trials went down 25.4 percent and 16.3 percent in 2016 and 2017 respectively, compared to the previous year.
The number of global clinical trials in South Korea is increasing because of high quality of domestic medial institutions. Global pharmaceutical firms have been started conducting a clinical trial in South Korea from early 2000 in earnest.
About 35 percent of cancer patients across the nation in Seoul are registered in large medical institutions in Seoul. The city has a big pool of patients. Therefore, there are many doctors who provide high-quality medical services and have an excellent ability to solve problems. This is why Seoul is the city that has the most number of clinical trials in the world. In addition, there are risks for pharmaceutical firms to scrap new drug development itself by mistake of clinical trial institutions, not by side effects of new drugs, when medical institutions conduct a clinical trial but have a poor quality of services.
The Korea National Enterprise for Clinical Trials (KoNECT) announced that the U.S. had the most clinical trials in the world, taking up nearly 24.5 percent of the clinical trial protocol market share, after its analysis of the clinical trials registered with the U.S. National Institutes for Health’s website ClinicalTrials.gov last year.
After the U.S., Germany came in second place with 5.3 percent, followed by the U.K. with 5 percent, Canada with 3.9 percent and China with 3.7 percent. South Korea ranked sixth in the world with a 3.5 percent market share, moving two notches up from the 8th at the previous year.
Ji Dong-hyun, CEO at the KoNECT, said, “South Korea puts up a good show in clinical trials. It means that the nation has proved its excellent clinical trial infrastructure and performance competency. As the government’s support is beginning to show results, we need to improve the ability of clinical trial development of government, industry and academia, advance regulations and introduce incentive systems in order to help domestically developed new drugs conduct a phase III clinical trial as well.”