Urvashi Prasad, Director of the Centre for Air Pollution and Environmental Health (PAVANA) at the Pahlé India Foundation, shared on LinkedIn:
“1.41%.
That is India’s share of the world’s lung cancer clinical trials over the last 20 years. Our share of the global disease burden is up to 5.7%. Our share of the world’s population is nearly 18%.
At the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer World Conference on Lung Cancer in Seoul, I presented a 20-year registry analysis (2004-2024) of ClinicalTrials.gov.
The findings:
- 9,290 lung cancer trials were registered globally. India: 131.
- Over 12 million participants were enrolled worldwide. India: 77,159.
- Global trial activity grew steadily, from ~198 to 753 trials a year. India stayed flat – 1 to 15 trials a year, with no sustained growth across two decades.
- 116 of India’s 131 trials were sponsored by global pharma. Domestic, investigator-led research is almost absent. This is not a capacity gap that is slowly closing. It is a structural exclusion that has not moved in 20 years.
The consequence is simple and serious: when Indian patients are absent from trials, Indian biology is absent from the evidence – and from the treatment guidelines built on it. We inherit therapies validated on populations that are not our own.
My thanks to Jane Perlmutter, Dr Vivek Tomar, Atharva Salunke, Arjun Kumar for their contribution to this research. The number is now on the record. The work is to change it.”
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