Deerfield
About Deerfield

Launched in 1994, Deerfield Management Company is an investment firm dedicated to advancing healthcare through information, investment, and philanthropy—all toward the end goal of cures for disease, improved quality of life, and reduced cost of care.

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Investment

Supporting companies across the healthcare ecosystem with flexible funding models…

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Information

Delivering market research to the Deerfield team, its portfolio companies and other partners.

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Philanthropy

A New York City-based not-for-profit devoted to advancing innovative health care initiatives.

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Portfolio Companies

Deerfield generally maintains a combined portfolio of more than 150 private and public investments across the life science, medical device, diagnostic, digital health and health service industries at all stages of evolution from start-up to mature company.

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Research Collaborations

Deerfield partners with leading academic research centers, providing critical funding and expertise to further sustain and accelerate the commercialization of discoveries toward meaningful societal impact by advancing cures for disease.

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Strategic Partners

As a strategic partner, Deerfield offers capital, scientific expertise, business operating support, and unique access to innovation.

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Deerfield Foundation

The Deerfield Foundation is a New York City-based not-for-profit organization whose mission is to improve health, accelerate innovation and promote human equity.

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Cure Campus

Cure is a 12-story innovation campus in New York City that intends to bring together innovators from academia, government, industry, and the not-for-profit sectors to advance human health and accelerate the fight against disease.

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Cure Programming

Cure has a series of expert lectures intended to advance thought in healthcare, management, innovation, policy, and other relevant subjects. This fosters growth and education for those at Cure and its guests.

Events at the Cure

Building a drug development database: Challenges in reliable data availability

Context

Policy and legislative efforts to improve the biomedical innovation process must rely on a detailed and thorough analysis of drug development and industry output.

Objective

As part of our efforts to build a publicly-available database on the characteristics of drug development, we present work undertaken to test methods for compiling data from public sources. These initial steps are designed to explore challenges in data extraction, completeness, and reliability. Specifically, filing dates for Investigational New Drugs (IND) applications with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were chosen as the initial objective data element to be collected.

Materials and methods

FDA’s Drugs@FDA database and the Federal Register (FR) were used to collect IND dates for the 587 NMEs approved between 1994 and 2014. When available, the following data were captured: approval date, IND number, IND date, source of information.

Results

At least one IND date was available for 445 (75.8%) of the 587 NMEs. The Drugs@FDA database provided IND dates for 303 (51.6%) NMEs and the Federal Register contributed with 297 (50.6%) IND dates. Out of the 445 NMEs for which an IND date was obtained, 274 (61.6%) had more than one date reported.

Discussion

Key finding of this paper is a considerable inconsistency in reliably available or reported data elements, in this particular case IND application filing dates as assembled from publicly-available sources.

Conclusion

Our team will continue to focus on finding ways to collect relevant information to measure impact of drug innovation.

Keywords: Biomedical innovation, Investigational New Drug, Food and Drug Administration, Federal Register, Drug development, Clinical trials,