Clinical investigators are integral to the drug-development process. They often play an important additional role in the adoption of new drugs, particularly for first-in-class agents. In the U.S., most investigators are practicing physicians in office or hospital settings, with only a portion of them based in medical schools and teaching hospitals. These practicing investigators, although not [...]

In the three months prior to the drug’s launch, both investigator and control physicians wrote a mean of 2.2% of all their prescriptions from the pharmaceutical company launching the new drug (SD ± 6.0 for the investigators, SD 4.3 for the control physicians). During this time, investigators wrote a mean total of 677 prescriptions (SD [...]

The drugs, or compounds, in clinical trials are classified by an indication based on the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) coding system. All of the drugs that we examined in our study represented new molecular entities (NMEs), or substantial reformulations of an existing drug. We required the re-formulations (e.g., extended-release) to be complete, [...]