"An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem."
-John Tukey
Clinical Trials: An overview
Clinical research is basically medical research people. There are two types: observational sstudies and clinical trials studies. Observational studies obseve people in normal settings. The princpal objective is to collect information over time to finally compare some specific traits/characteristics. The way to collect information normally involves: exams, tests or questionnaires. On the other hand clinical trials are the research studies that are aimed at evaluating medical, surgical, or behavioral intervention. The principal ibjectives are to proof the safety and effectiveness of new treatments such as: Investigational Product, Diet or Medical Device.
On the video displayed on the right we can see a heatmap of the number of clinical trials implemented on each country from 2005 to 2022. In this case USA is exluded due to the number of clinical trials performed on the country.
Try yourself!
For the visualization that I'm about to show you, all the data was collected from clinicaltrials.gov is a free open source where you can find every single clinical trial performed around the world.
For the following visualization it will be included every country from 2000 to 2022:
In this first graph we can visualize the top 15 conditions and the participation from different sponsors to each condition.
Ont he other hand this seconf figurs shows the top 10 sponsors and the number of studies implemented in each continent, as is well know the european union on the first place of number of Clinical Trials perform
Trends in Clinical Trials
For example for the prostate cancer condition the number of studies recruiting subject and ongoing had shown a positive trend since 2010. This kind of behaivior it could be and indicator to the CROs to develop certain tools or if it XXXXXXXXXX
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HIV tuvo si pico mas alto en 2012-2013 lo cual explica este comportamiento en la unon europea https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/hivaids-annual-epidemiological-report-2014 y ademas en 2009 hubo respuestas interesantes file:///C:/Users/Mauricio%20Aguilar/Desktop/Vacunas%20contra%20el%20VIH-1%20.pdf y ultimamente se tienen noticias de nuevos tratamientos y vacunas para VIH https://www.infobae.com/america/ciencia-america/2020/12/02/una-vacuna-contra-el-vih-llego-a-la-ultima-fase-de-ensayos-por-primera-vez-un-una-decada/
Dividing the studies by condition and continent
Another really usefull visualization where you can infere relations between data "without" statistical analysis. Using the library "Networkx" in python we can count the ocurrance of certain variables, for example the relationship between sponsors taking as variable the condition they study, other example could be the top conditions studied in each country or continent, fortunately with Python building this scenarios is incredibely easy as we will see on the following figures.
En la imagine se bserva los diagramas de relaciones y de cierta forma se puede obervar a las farmas que mas se parecen, en este caso Takeda, J&J, Elly Lilly y Sanofi por otro lado Glaxo y Merck tienen un parecido mayor. On this first figure, besides the overwhelming amount of lines and dots, the blue dotes are the sponsors and the other one are studies, for conditions with:
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* 1 trial = green
* 5 trials = yellow
* 10 trials = orange
*15 trials = red
*>15 trials = purple
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Also this kind of Network is desing to approach the blue dots in function of how many conditions they shared as is shown below. For example Takeda, Sanofi, Janssen and Eli Lilly are really close to each other due to the conditions they study. This is important to consider for service companies, if we understand what type of condition the clients study we are capable of developing tools centered on this conditions, therefore we are more likely to prepare a competent bid to earn a study, in the case we are analysis from the point of view of a CRO.
Explore the full image!
For example another type of anaylisis could be the top 15 conditions and their sponsors in this case Astra Zeneca, Pfizer and Novartis shared the center of the figure showing a strong relation with the top 15 conditions studied since 2005.
On the other hand with the network shown on the right we can see that Africa do not shared conditions with other countries, on the other hands North America and Europe share almost evry single condition shown in this figure.
Similar to the figure shown before we have the same analysis shown but for country level.
Interactive Map
Another part of Networkx is for generating an interactive
