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).