Assessing the impact of COVID-19 on registered interventional clinical trials

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a dramatic impact worldwide and presented unprecedented challenges for clinical and translational medicine. We assess the impact of COVID-19 on submitted and completed interventional clinical trials that have been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. After classifying over 85% of the registered clinical trials by their source, we carefully model the number of submitted and completed trials before and after March 2020. Overall, we find minimal impact of COVID-19 on the number of submitted clinical trials, although a much more substantial impact is observed for completed clinical trials. We also show that clinical trials with a pharmaceutical sponsor were more successful at completing trials during the pandemic compared to the trials with academic/hospital/government sponsors.