Data blog: clinical trial activity in Europe by country

The European Medicines Agency has just released its quarterly data update on drug trials conducted within Europe.

The charts below provide an overview of new initial clinical trial applications from January 2022 until the end of 2025. While not all of those studies will have been approved, the data provide a nice heuristic overview of drug trial volume and composition by country.

Number of drug trials per country

Patients in Spain, France, Germany, Italy and – maybe surprisingly – Poland have access to the largest numbers of planned drug trials.

Note that EMA’s data only cover drug trials (CTIMPs). Literally nobody knows the number of non-drug trials in Europe, as data on those trials are fragmented across multiple clinical trial registries.

Mononational versus multinational trials

The next table shows how what percentage of drug trials with a trial site in any given country are multinational.

The high percentage of multinational drug trials in Hungary, Bulgaria and Greece is probably due to a large majority of trials in those countries being run by industry sponsors. Large pharma companies are far more likely than noncommercial sponsors to launch trials that span multiple countries.

It is unclear why the the percentage of multinational trials in the Netherlands, Denmark and France is lower than in other, similar countries.

This is just a quick and dirty analysis of data routinely published by EMA.

TranspariMED encourages others to subscribe to EMA's clinical trial updates and dive deeper into the data.