Assessing the Alignment of Biomedical Research and Clinical Translation

More than half of later stage drug clinical trials fail due to lack of efficacy, highlighting gaps in our understanding of disease-target relationships. While it is widely believed that scientific research is essential for identifying drug-targets, whether scientists can allocate their research attention according to the clinical potential of disease-target relationships is remains a matter of debate. To address this knowledge gap, we analyzed data from Open Targets, a comprehensive disease-target relationship platform. We build an automated open pipeline that follows drugs through consecutive clinical trial phases and use it to uncover that research attention in the disease-specific primary literature has some predictive power for trial success. However, research attention toward specific targets are not predictive for overall trial success across diseases. Our study thus highlights the crucial, yet complex, role of the primary research literature in steering clinical trials, encouraging a more nuanced approach to translational medicine.