Drug development abandonment stage for Japanese pharmaceutical companies

With a focus on Japan, this paper empirically examines the stage in which drug development is abandoned. The time-consuming approval process for new drugs involves many stages and has low certainty. Based on pipeline data, we examine the stage in which drug development is completely abandoned or is “dead.” Using pipeline data on Japanese pharmaceutical companies, we investigate whether the abandonment of drug development depends on the drugs' characteristics. Through a review of the data, we find differences in the timing of drug development abandonment and the number of such abandonment by the disease and technology.