Assessing the impact of COVID‐19 on registered interventional clinical trials

Abstract

Abstract The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic has led to a dramatic impact worldwide and presented unprecedented challenges for clinical and translational medicine. We assess the impact of COVID‐19 on submitted and completed interventional clinical trials that have been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. After classifying over 85% of the registered clinical trials by their source, we carefully model the number of submitted and completed trials before and after March 2020. Overall, we find minimal impact of COVID‐19 on the number of submitted clinical trials, although a much more substantial impact is observed for completed clinical trials. We also show that clinical trials with a pharmaceutical sponsor were more successful at completing trials during the pandemic compared to the trials with academic/hospital/government sponsors.