As of the end of May this year, clinicaltrials.gov shows 425 ongoing clinical trials for 'COPD', trials that are currently recruiting subjects. Adding 'emphysema and 'bronchitis' to the search term only raises the total to 510. An unscientific scan of these trials indicates that fewer than half involve a drug that has not yet been approved. But how does our pipeline compare with the pipeline for other common disorders, again limiting the search to ongoing trials? For the search term 'cancer' it's 11,900; for 'coronary' it is 5,200; and for 'diabetes' it's 2,275. Even 'arthritis', a potentially serious but rarely fatal condition, shows 949 ongoing trials-almost twice as many trials as for the third commonest cause of death in most of the world.
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