The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) review of drugs, although guided by broad standards, remains individualized. Each drug or drug class faces unique challenges during the FDA review phase – thus no two reviews are exactly the same. Each review division within the FDA has its own approach, and evaluations often differ among the centers. To help understand the review process, the team at ProEd Regulatory sought to learn from the past to inform our future. We reviewed applications submitted to the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) data over the last 70 years to see what patterns might emerge. Although the largest proportion of products (drugs and biologics) fails between discovery and Phase 3, an evaluation of applications submitted to the FDA over the last 70 years shows that the vast majority of products that reach the submission stage are ultimately approved (Figure 1).¹
It wasn’t until the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments of 1962 that the FDA required sponsors to demonstrate both efficacy and safety of their drugs prior to market access. In the wake of this significant legislation’s impact on drug development, we still see a consistent flow of approved applications and a corresponding subset of new molecular entities (NMEs) (Figure 2).¹

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