Investigating drug translational research using PubMed articles

TL;DR

This study analyzes drug translational research using PubMed data, revealing long development times, limited cross-disciplinary collaboration, and providing a new indicator to measure translational lag in drug development.

Contribution

It introduces the Translational Lag indicator and visualizes the status of drug research, highlighting the slow progress and limited collaboration between basic and clinical sciences.

Findings

Average translational lag of 14.38 years from discovery to clinical research

Only 18.1% of drugs entered clinical research successfully

Limited interdisciplinary collaboration observed in drug research

Abstract

Drug research and development are embracing translational research for its potential to increase the number of drugs successfully brought to clinical applications. Using the publicly available PubMed database, we sought to describe the status of drug translational research, the distribution of translational lags for all drugs as well as the collaborations between basic science and clinical science in drug research. For each drug, an indicator called Translational Lag was proposed to quantify the interval time from its first PubMed article to its first clinical article. Meanwhile, the triangle of biomedicine was also used to visualize the status and multidisciplinary collaboration of drug translational research. The results showed that only 18.1% (24,410) of drugs/compounds had been successfully entering clinical research. It averagely took 14.38 years (interquartile range, 4 to 21 years) for a drug from the initial basic discovery to its first clinical research. In addition, the results also revealed that, in drug research, there was rare cooperation between basic science and clinical science, which were more inclined to cooperate within disciplines.