Thank you to everyone that participated in our first Budget Benchmark challenge. The challenge closed in April 2018. However, the turn out was low as we received only 9 submissions of planned costs. In view of this, the data collected wasn't sufficient to draw any meaningful conclusions or comparisons.

TrialValue's benchmark algorithm generated median per-patient-budget (all costs) for phase III studies ranged from $34,500 to $68,000 factoring various complexity scenarios and assumptions. (Data: >100K study budgets, compiled from published data, meta-analysis, simulations and expert knowledge).

Why the low rate of participation? This could be due to a number of reasons: including low publicity (challenge was only promoted on social media) and perhaps it didn't reach the right audience. Also, based on the benchmarking roundtable discussions  during this year's CBI clinical trial budget conference it appears that many pharma companies don't typically conduct analysis of final study budgets (actuals) against historical costs or compare with industry available data. Benchmarking is mainly done to obtain per-patient-cost and procedure costs at a study and site level for contract negotiations and to support FMV compliance process.

It was also mentioned that benchmarking is difficult to implement because of lack of standardization of budget components, time/resource constraints, variable study complexity and continuous changes to R&D portfolio assumptions.

Now the good news: To help overcome some of these hurdles, we're fine tuning our machine learning enabled algorithms TrialValue A.I.+ we expect to start roll out in a few weeks.