The benefits and costs of running trials This process brings benefits: doctors have higher-quality evidence on whether drugs are effective and safe, helping them prescribe better treatments; researchers can learn from clear evidence of successes and failures to develop new and improved drugs.

But it also comes with costs. One is the expense of running clinical trials (often reaching hundreds of millions of dollars), which discourages researchers from developing new, experimental drugs and drugs without a large financial market. Another is the time it takes to conduct trials (typically several years), which delays access to potentially life-saving drugs.