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Institute Report
Global Trends in R&D 2025
Progress in Recapturing Momentum in Biopharma Innovation
Mar 26, 2025
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The life sciences innovation ecosystem has continued to evolve and expand as industry adapts to a complex and dynamic range of geopolitical, technological, and social uncertainties, and investment continues to flow into the sector. Innovative science has also grown in parallel, as evidenced by an increasing proportion of novel therapeutic modalities in clinical trials and by innovative products receiving regulatory approval and reaching patients — with multiple important cell and gene therapy drugs having achieved recent success, alongside new options for historically challenging indications. Despite these advances, improving the efficiency of R&D remains an important objective for biopharmaceutical companies and significant opportunities exist to reduce medicine development times and increase probabilities of success.

This annual trend report from the IQVIA Institute assesses the trends in R&D funding, clinical trial activity, and new drug approvals and launches. It also examines the efficiency and productivity of clinical development, using a refreshed Clinical Program Productivity Index, while also providing insights on contributing factors and enablers. Operationally addressable cycle time components are investigated by examining clinical trial timelines in the broader context of a typical medicine development program, demonstrating critical within- and between-trial components that can be targeted to accelerate development. The continued significance of emerging biopharma companies and of geographical shifts in clinical trial activity are revisited throughout.

Key Findings:


  • R&D funding has increased:
    • Biopharma funding increased for the second consecutive year
    • Total large pharma R&D spending continued to increase
  • Clinical trial start volumes have stabilized:
    • Trial starts have fully returned to pre-pandemic levels
    • Priorities have continued to shift
  • Clinical program productivity has increased:
    • Assessed using refreshed Clinical Program Productivity Index (CPPI)
    • Improvement in productivity was driven by a success rate increase in Phase III
  • Cycle times are stabilizing:
    • Enrollment duration – the largest opportunity to improve trial cycle times – stabilized in 2024 after having increased between 2021 and 2023.
    • Inter-trial intervals now typically account for 17 months of total development time across an R&D program; this figure has improved greatly since the 2022 peak of 32 months seen at the height of the pandemic.

Other Findings:

Small molecule share of trial starts by phase and company segment, 2015–2024
  • The small molecule share of clinical trial starts has been steadily declining over the past decade, with the most significant drop observed in Phase III trials, where small molecule share fell from 65% in 2015 to 53% in 2024.
  • Small molecule share also fell over the same period in Phase II, from 62% to 47%, and — to a lesser extent — in Phase I, from 71% to 61%.
  • EBP trials generally mirrored the overall trend, although small molecules trials were more frequent among EBPs than among larger companies.

NAS launches in the U.S. and EU4+UK, 2015–2024
  • Novel medicines do not launch in every country simultaneously, and increasingly there is a gap where medicines launched in the U.S. are not widely available in other countries.
  • In the past five years there have been 110 (40%) U.S. NAS launches that have not yet been launched in the key European markets, while only 14 (7%) drugs launched in Europe have failed to be launched in the U.S.
  • The U.S. is the most common first-launch country, and there are often lags of a year or more to other country launches.

Companies originating and filing FDA regulatory submissions for NAS and percent of launches by NAS launch year, 2015–2024
  • Emerging biopharma companies are responsible for the largest share of early drug development and historically licensed those assets to larger firms for commercialization. These historic patterns have shifted notably in the last decade.
  • EBP companies originated 85% of the 48 NAS launched in 2024. The cumulative percentage of NAS originated by EBP from 2020–2024 was 59%, an increase on the 2015-2019 figure of 53%, indicating a growing share of EBP innovation reaching the market.
  • Launched novel active substances (NAS) originated by EBP companies have increased in absolute numbers, with 41 NAS launched in 2024 that originated from an EBP company, up from 34 in 2019, and being more than half of NAS launches every year since 2016.

Country utilization as percent of trial country-uses 2019 and 2024
  • The share of total country-uses per region for trials started in 2024 compared to 2019 reflects large global shifts.
  • Western Europe remained the most utilized region in 2024, with a 28% share of global country-uses, but this relative share was 12% lower than in 2019 — having declined from 32%.
  • Central and Eastern Europe utilization fell from 16% in 2019 to 11% in 2024, a 28% decline in relative share that pushed the region from its 2019 position as the third most utilized region to its fifth-place 2024 position.

Framework for impact of major productivity enablers
  • Sponsors are targeting productivity improvements in clinical development by employing a variety of approaches to improve development speed, success rates and costs — three fundamental components of R&D efficiency.
  • At an organizational level, systematic and robust implementation of decision frameworks and clinical technologies can improve speed, success, and costs of clinical R&D, while company-specific internal investigation of cycle times can identify priority addressable intervals to target for operational improvement.
  • Patient representativeness and real-world evidence activities as well as artificial intelligence solutions can be employed at multiple levels, to enhance specific trials and R&D programs selectively or through embedding capabilities, processes and solutions at an organizational level.
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