Industry funding and study sites
The sponsors and study regions between the post-marketing trials and the trials for new drugs are significantly different. Only 2 of these new drug trials were sponsored by foreign pharmaceutical companies, GlaxoSmithKline China and Shanghai Utimes Trading. The rest were mainly from domestic companies in Hubei (4 companies), Hebei (3), Hainan (3), Shanghai (3). 100 study sites were listed (Figure 4a), and 66% (66/100) were located in developed east cities and economical and cultural provinces such as Beijing (15), Shanghai (14), Jiangsu (13), Hunan (10), Zhejiang (7) and Shandong (7). Of the post-marketing clinical trials, only six were sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, 35.2% (31/88) were sponsored by society or foundation or the government, and the rest 57.9% were sponsored by the investigators themselves. The trials analyzed listed 82 institutions (Figure 4b), mainly located in east and south cities such as Zhejiang (13), Guangdong (12), Shanghai (10) and Jiangsu (10).