Study design
Our goals were to characterize clinical trials across major neurodegenerative disease indications, identifying correlations and temporal trends, particularly with regards to disease stages and molecular targets of drugs. We chose ClinicalTrials.gov as a data source because (i) it is publicly available, allowing us to release our reviewed and annotated dataset and source code and thus make our analyses fully reproducible, (ii) it has existed since 2000, thus providing 2 decades of data, and (iii) compliance with Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act (FDAAA) mandates have made it a fairly comprehensive listing of trials19,20. Trial results are not always posted or published in a timely fashion21,22,23, but our analysis focused on the design, not results, of trials. We determined that the ClinicalTrials.gov data, downloadable in XML format, necessitated a hybrid…
