How drug research actually reaches patients
From the first laboratory grant to the day your GP can prescribe it. In plain English.
A treatment does not appear in a pharmacy one day. It moves through a series of stages, and each one takes as long as it takes. Knowing which stage something is at tells you how far along it is. It does not tell you when, or whether, it will arrive.
This page describes those stages in plain words. Voxsanity itself covers one of them: clinical trials that are open and have a site in Australia.
The five stages, and what each one means for you
Long before anything is tested in a person, researchers work out what might be worth testing. That is laboratory work: understanding what goes wrong in a disease, finding something that might change it, and testing it in cells and in animals. Most ideas stop here.
Researchers publish what they found, and other groups try to repeat it. When several groups get the same answer, a view forms about whether an idea is worth the expense of testing in people. This is slow, and it is where most of the argument happens.
Trials run in phases. Phase 1 tests safety in a small group. Phase 2 tests whether the treatment appears to work. Phase 3 compares it against the current standard of care at scale, and is the last step before a regulator will consider approving it. Phase 4 comes after approval, watching a treatment already in ordinary use.
Most treatments never finish this stage, and that is the normal outcome rather than a failure of the system. Historically, around 10% of drugs entering Phase 1 eventually reach approval, rising to about 30% from Phase 2 and about 65% from Phase 3. So a treatment in early testing is a long way from certain, and a trial appearing on this site is not a promise that anything will come of it. Those are industry wide historical averages, not predictions about any particular trial: what they do and do not mean.
After a successful Phase 3 trial, the sponsor gives all the evidence to a regulator. In Australia that is the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which assesses quality, safety and how well the treatment works, and decides whether it may be supplied here and for which uses. Regulators in other countries make their own separate decisions, and those decide nothing for Australia.
Approval is not a guarantee. It means a regulator judged that the benefits outweigh the risks for the specific uses it approved. Known and as yet unknown risks remain, and the product information published for each medicine is where those are set out.
Being allowed on the market and being affordable are two different things, and the second is a separate decision. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme is the government scheme that pays most of the cost of many prescription medicines, and a treatment has to be assessed and listed before that subsidy applies. Until it is, the price is set privately and there is no cap on it.
There are also pathways for treatments that are not approved for general supply at all, which a doctor arranges. Treatment access explains the PBS, those pathways and medicine shortages in plain words.
Voxsanity covers 149 conditions, and shows trials that are open and have at least one site in Australia. What that leaves out is set out on what we cover.
Not medical advice. Information on this site does not constitute medical advice. Trial status can change at any time, so always confirm it directly with the trial site, and talk to your own doctor before making any decision about your treatment.