Attrition Rate

Attrition Rate designates the proportion of drug candidates failing to advance through development stages due to safety, efficacy, manufacturing, or commercial reasons, representing a key performance metric for drug development efficiency. High attrition rates characterise pharmaceutical development with approximately 90% of clinical entrants failing to reach approval.

The pharmaceutical industry continuously works to improve attrition rates through better target selection, improved preclinical models, biomarker-guided development, and adaptive clinical designs. Safety attrition from unexpected toxicities drives investment in predictive toxicology. Efficacy failures motivate improved animal model selection and translational biomarker development. Clinical biomarker-guided patient selection enriches trials for likely responders improving efficacy demonstration probability. Integrated data analysis identifies attrition patterns informing future programme design decisions. As artificial intelligence analyses large datasets identifying features predicting development success, attrition rates may gradually improve through earlier identification of problematic candidates and better go/no-go decision making.