What share of clinical trials do companies run?

Companies led 19% of the clinical trials that started in 2025, against a high of 39.0% in 2002. Universities, hospitals and nonprofits lead almost all the rest. The 2000 figure is low partly because few trials were registered before 2005, when medical journals began requiring it.

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Key facts

Measure: % of trials started led by a company. Written from the data below.

  • The latest figure, for 2025, is 19%.
  • That is down 5.3 percentage points from 24.3% in 2000.
  • The highest was 39% in 2002.
  • The lowest was 18.2% in 2024.

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Source and date

Source
ClinicalTrials.gov (U.S. National Library of Medicine), counted with its API v2
License
Public domain (U.S. government work); source National Library of Medicine
Data as of
Published

Citation

Chartly. “What share of clinical trials do companies run?” Chart. Data: ClinicalTrials.gov (U.S. National Library of Medicine), counted with its API v2, https://clinicaltrials.gov/data-api/api (data as of November 3, 2026). https://chart.ly/charts/clinical-trials-led-by-companies (accessed November 4, 2026).

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The data

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The file has the numbers in this table, with the source, license and date. Please credit the source and Chartly. Developers can also get them as JSON (how).

Year the trial started % of trials started led by a company
2000 24.3
2001 31.1
2002 39
2003 38
2004 38.2
2005 37
2006 38.4
2007 37.9
2008 36.7
2009 34.1
2010 32
2011 31.2
2012 28.4
2013 26.6
2014 26.1
2015 24.5
2016 22.6
2017 21.6
2018 21.6
2019 20.9
2020 21.6
2021 22.6
2022 21.5
2023 19.4
2024 18.2
2025 19

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