Are your clinical trials risky? Are costs running away?
It’s very tricky to estimate clinical trial costs before a trial is run.
Try our free clinical trial cost calculator. This is a regression model for clinical trial cost breakdowns, trained on real clinical trial data.
| Trial is for condition | |
| Phase | |
| Vaccine trial? | |
| Country | |
| Sample size | |
| Number of interventions |
The Clinical Trial Risk Tool’s budget add-on allows you to generate a budget in multi-tabbed Excel format. The AI locates the Schedule of Events in the protocol PDF and looks up the costs of the activities. It then generates an Excel where each cohort or site is represented as its own tab, and the activities and visits on which they occur are translated into cost items to be summed. This is a bottom-up approach to trial costing. Here’s a demo:
You can read more here about how the Clinical Trial Risk Tool helps you make an itemised trial budget.
Find out about trial costs
In addition to the activity-based costing described above (based on the Schedule of Events), the Clinical Trial Risk Tool also supports a top-down cost estimation, also directly from your protocol text.
A large amount of the data needed to estimate the total cost of a clinical trial is contained within the unstructured text of the protocol. Notably, some items, such as CRO costs, will need to be inferred (examples include the number of CRA meetings, and the expected number of adverse events and serious adverse events).
The Clinical Trial Risk Tool, developed by Fast Data Science, will let you upload a PDF protocol and will directly identify some risk and cost features. We have a top-down approach to cost modelling where we have trained a model on past trials and predict the cost of a planned trial based on key features such as sample size, but we are currently developing a bottom-up approach which would allow the generation of an itemised budget in spreadsheet form.
Unlike other clinical trial cost calculators you may find online, our clinical trial cost models are regression models trained on past trials. You can download the training dataset here - the original source is here.
Here’s a preview of our training data that we used to develop our regression models:
| Indication | Technology | NCT# | Tech II | Enrollment | Trial Phase | Total Cost | Per Patient Cost ($PP) | Source for this Data | Name of the Source | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Advanced Myeloid Malignancy | biologic drug | - | 30 | Phase 1 | $328,000.00 | $10,933 | doc | SEC agreements | |||
| Blood Cancer | biologic drug | NCT03483324 | 9 | Phase 1 | $5,000,000.00 | $555,556 | doc | CIRM | |||
| Blood Cancer | biologic drug | NCT03925935 | 24 | Phase 1 | $6,192,579.00 | $258,024 | doc | CIRM | |||
| B cell cancers, Leukemia | biologic drug | NCT03088878 | 156 | Phase 1/2 | $18,292,674.00 | $117,261 | doc | CIRM | |||
| Blood Cancer | biologic drug | NCT02222688 | 26 | Phase 1 | $4,179,598.00 | $160,754 | doc | CIRM | |||
| Colon Cancer | biologic drug | NCT02953782 | 112 | Phase 1/2 | $10,234,048.00 | $91,375 | doc | CIRM | |||
| Leukemia, Acute Myeloid (AML) | biologic drug | NCT03248479 | 96 | Phase 1 | $5,000,000.00 | $52,083 | doc | CIRM | |||
| Blood Cancer, Solid Tumors | biologic drug | NCT02216409 | 88 | Phase 1 | $6,505,568.00 | $73,927 | doc | CIRM | |||
| Breast Cancer | biologic drug | NCT00781612 | 720 | Phase 3 | - | $104,186.49 | https://doc | KEI FOIA Response/University of Colorad | |||
| Stage IV Melanoma | cell therapy | NCT00438984 | 11 | Phase 1 | $936,164.00 | $85,106 | doc | FOIA’d NIH grants | |||
The Clinical Trial Risk Tool:
We originally developed the Clinical Trial Risk Tool to estimate costs of Tuberculosis and HIV trials. In 2024, we extended the scope of our clinical trial cost software to cover other disease indications including:
In addition to cost estimation, the Clinical Trial Risk Tool also provides clinical trial risk assessment (how to quantify the risk of a trial ending without delivering informative results), and clinical trial complexity.
When you’re planning a clinical trial, you have to write the protocol.
This is a PDF document which is 200 pages long.
It says what drug you are testing, who will participate in your trial, over what time period, and what they will be required to do. It may also say how you will manufacture the drug, how it will be delivered, where the trial will take place, and how you will analyse the data.
If you want an organisation to fund your trial (a sponsor), they will need to read the protocol and estimate the cost, and be satisfied that the trial is not too risky.
To complete this risk assessment and cost assessment, you will need experts in multiple fields to read and assess the protocol. This is subjective (different people might come to different conclusions) and it’s slow.
Find out about trial costs
The Clinical Trial Risk Tool unifies the technical knowledge in the protocol (medical or statistical information) with the business knowledge (finances, risk management) for clinical trial cost analysis.
Imagine you could have a tool which could read your protocols and estimate the cost and risk, immediately!
If you work for the trial sponsor, this works along with other clinical trial budget software to triage the protocols that you receive from investigators, identifying who’s worth pursuing.
In a pharmaceutical company, this helps your business plan cash flow and quantify and diversify risk.
If you are investing in pharmaceutical development, this helps you understand your exposure to risk.
If you’re a CRO (contract research organisation, i.e. the company that is contracted to run the trials), you can prepare quotes and cost estimates for your clients (pharma companies) quickly and easily.
A number of documents are needed to produce a complete and accurate clinical trial budget. The necessary documents typically include: the study protocol (generally the most important document for building a budget) the informed consent form the clinical trial agreement or sponsor contract any laboratory and pharmacy manuals the charge master or schedule of fees the sponsor’s budget. However, sometimes a sponsor will send only the synopsis to a CRO when requesting a quote.
Are you wondering how you can build a detailed clinical trial budget from the protocol, whether for a site, CRO, or sponsor? This may appear an intimidating task. You have to read the protocol carefully, find the schedule of events, calculate how many times each activity occurs during the trial, and slowly create an itemised budget spreadsheet. There are cost items buried in footnotes that you need to look for.
Guest post by Youssef Soliman, medical student at Assiut University and biostatistician In 2025, the outsourcing of clinical trials has become a common strategy for pharmaceutical and biotechnology sponsors. Facing rising R&D costs and complicated studies, sponsors turn to Contract Research Organizations (CROs) and other external partners to manage clinical trials. This practice, known as outsourcing clinical trials, is adopted as a best practice for containing costs and enhancing efficiency in drug development [1].
