[tlb]

It mentions 1622 current clinical trials. Of those, how many would be expected to be approved in a rational system?

I wonder if the huge %age is due to a lot of low-quality applications mixed in with the serious ones. If the barrier to apply is sufficiently low, you would expect a Sturgeon's law dynamic.

[Alex3917]

> I wonder if the huge %age is due to a lot of low-quality applications mixed in with the serious ones.

I doubt it. Most clinical trial data in the U.S. is similarly fraudulent, but there isn't really any concept of high-quality vs low-quality applications like you might see with YC or whatever.

Instead, pharma companies tend to rely on the same set of 20 or 30 tricks to take chemical compounds that might be no better than placebos and make them look like wonder drugs. I've been keeping a tally of these tricks on my website:

http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#pharmaceuticals