Clinical trial cost calculator

Understand your clinical trial costs

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.

Do you want to calculate clinical trial cost directly from the protocol?

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.

How did we train this cost calculator?

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:

Why use natural language processing for clinical trial cost calculations?

The Clinical Trial Risk Tool:

• Saves time reading lengthy clinical trial documents
• Identifies any factors that could indicate your trial is risky
  • Boehringer Ingelheim improved their financial modelling using AI tools developed by Fast Data Science
  • The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is using our tool to triage HIV and TB trials into high and low risk
  • A quarter of trials fail. The Gates Foundation is able to identify high risk trials using our tool and avoid funding risky trials.
• Creates a report detailing the analysis of your trial
  • see PDF report example
• Estimates a cost in dollars of running your trial, based on machine learning models trained on real data in your field. If you disagree with the cost weightings used in the tool, you can easily adjust them for your field. For example, if you are working in a field where trial costs tend to be very high, such as cell therapy or gene therapy, you may want to adjust the tool’s average cost per subject. If this is the case, please contact us to discuss your needs.
• Provides transparent and understandable cost and risk estimates for all trial phases
• Does not send your data to any third party AI companies, and does not rely on generative AI
• Based on published peer-reviewed research
  • Wood, McNair, Clinical Trial Risk Tool: software application using natural language processing to identify the risk of trial uninformativeness

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:

• COVID-19
• Cystic fibrosis (CF)
• Enteric and diarrheal diseases (EDD)
• Influenza
• Malaria
• Motor neurone disease (MND)
• Multiple sclerosis (MS)
• Neglected tropical diseases (NTD)
• Oncology
• Polio.

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.

Pain points running a clinical trial

• 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.

Fast Data Science’s value proposition for the Clinical Trial Risk Tool

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.

See also

• Complexity modelling for RCTs
• Cost modelling for RCTs
• RCT risk assessment
• RCT informativeness
• Oncology clinical trial complexity
• Informativeness of Cystic fibrosis clinical trials
• Influenza clinical trials cost modelling