Before a new medicine can be sold, it has to be tested on people. Those tests are registered in public, on a US government website, and anyone can read them.
There are 603,967 of them. 1,357 list a hospital or clinic in the Philippines.
That is 0.22% of the world's. But the share is not the interesting part. What the records are shaped like is.
Most Of Them Are Not Really Ours
Only 281 of those trials happen in the Philippines and nowhere else. The other 1,076 run in several countries at once.
So I asked a simple question of those: how much of the trial is actually here?
Every trial lists its hospitals. Add them all up and these 1,076 studies use 166,220 hospitals around the world. 5,217 of them are Philippine. That is 3.1%.
In 77.7% of them, the Philippines supplies fewer than one hospital in ten. Only 37 put half or more of their hospitals here.
Who Is In The Trial With Us
Those studies reach 141 other countries. United States is in 61.5% of them, more than any other.
After that it is Europe and East Asia. Not our neighbours. These are not South-East Asian studies that happen to include us — they are worldwide studies, and we are one stop on the list.
The Stage Tells You The Job
Drug trials come in stages. Phase 1 is the first time a drug is given to humans at all: a few dozen people, very careful, very technical. Phase 3 is the big one near the end: thousands of patients, comparing the new drug against what doctors already use.
Phase 1 needs laboratories and specialists. Phase 3 needs patients.
723 of our trials are Phase 3 — 53.3%. 21 are Phase 1.
And 85.2% are run by companies. The US National Institutes of Health leads 13.
Compared To The Neighbours
Against the countries a drug company would weigh us against, we come 10th out of 11. Only Vietnam is lower, on 1,324.
Singapore has 4,096 — 3.0 times ours, with a much smaller population. Thailand has 4,329.
I have not divided any of this by population, and I should say why: every population dataset good enough to divide by comes with a licence this site does not accept. So these are plain counts. Do the adjustment in your head and it does not get better.
One Thing I Chose Not To Collect
The register is a US government website, so its contents are public domain and free to reuse. But the words in each record are written by the drug company that registered it, and the government's own policy says contributed material can still be somebody's copyright.
So I never asked for it. The request I send lists only facts — dates, counts, statuses, city names. No titles, no summaries, no descriptions. That text was never downloaded, so it is not sitting in my files, and an automatic check stops it from ever getting there.
It costs me something. I cannot tell you what any individual trial is testing.
Two Things I Still Cannot Tell You
Whether we are studying the right things. The obvious next question is whether these trials match what Filipinos are actually sick with. The illness data needed for that also has the wrong licence. So I stopped, rather than guess.
Whether a trial is really still running. A status is only as honest as the last time someone updated it. 8 of these trials say they are still recruiting patients while also giving a finish date that has already gone by.
Want to see all the charts and data tables?
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