Several hypotheses were offered to explain these trends, including a gestation lag associated with the fundamental transformations of the scientific knowledge, underlying innovation dynamics within companies. 1, 2 Data from the previous two decades showed a progressive increase of attrition rates throughout the whole pipeline of drug development and a significant increase of the time needed for the completion of clinical trials between the 1990s and the 2000s. Finally, by analyses of the relative contribution of different institutional types and development companies, we show that the observed increased performance in clinical trials is mostly due to the contribution of biotech-nological companies, while pharmaceutical companies have significantly improved their performances in identifying false positives in preclinical research.Īt the beginning of 2010s, many concerns were raised on the ongoing process of drug development, which culminated in a diffuse perception of a “productivity crisis” of the pharmaceutical R&D. Notably, more recent projects are increasingly based on novel mechanisms of action and target indications with small patient populations. In parallel, we observed an increase of early failures in preclinical research, and a significant reduction of time required to identify projects to be discontinued. Importantly, attrition rates have been decreasing at all clinical stages in recent years. First, we investigated how R&D projects are allocated across therapeutic areas and found a polarization towards high-risk/high-reward indications, with a strong focus on oncology. We produced a new set of analyses for the last decade, using an extensive data of more than 45,000 projects between 19, and report a recent upsurge of R&D productivity within the industry. Analyses of pharmaceutical pipelines of drug development in the 1990-2010 documented progressively increasing attrition rates and duration of clinical trials, leading to a diffuse perception of a “productivity crisis”.