Who runs US clinical trials

2,468 organizations are running the 10,790 trials currently recruiting at a US site across our 17 tracked conditions. The top of that list is not who most people expect.

How concentrated the field is

19%

of trials run by the 10 largest organizations

43%

run by the 50 largest

1,660

organizations running exactly one trial (67% of all sponsors)

Clinical research in the US is a small number of very large operations sitting on top of a very long tail. The 10 biggest organizations run 19% of everything currently recruiting, while two thirds of all sponsors are running a single trial each.

Trials run	Organizations	Trials covered
50 or more	49	4,622
10 to 49	102	2,491
3 to 9	292	1,287
2	365	730
1	1,660	1,660

The 25 largest sponsors

Ranked by trials currently recruiting at a US site. Linked names have a detail page; the rest are listed for reference. “Main focus” is the condition an organization runs most, and the percentage is how much of its work sits there, which separates the single-disease specialists from the broad research hospitals. Where an organization also runs trials with no US site, the worldwide figure is in the last column, and the gap is sometimes large.

#	Organization	Main focus	US trials	Worldwide
1	M.D. Anderson Cancer Center	Cancer 99%	420	420
2	Mayo Clinic	Cancer 74%	297	297
3	Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center	Cancer 100%	295	296
4	National Cancer Institute (NCI)	Cancer 100%	274	274
5	Massachusetts General Hospital	Cancer 57%	158	161
6	City of Hope Medical Center	Cancer 97%	139	142
7	AstraZeneca	Cancer 72%	113	191
8	Washington University School of Medicine	Cancer 73%	113	116
9	University of California, San Francisco	Cancer 55%	108	112
10	University of Colorado, Denver	Cancer 43%	108	108
11	Emory University	Cancer 64%	97	98
12	Stanford University	Cancer 55%	95	95
13	Dana-Farber Cancer Institute	Cancer 100%	92	92
14	Yale University	Cancer 36%	87	88
15	Duke University	Cancer 46%	82	84
16	Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC	Cancer 95%	82	86
17	VA Office of Research and Development	Cancer 31%	81	81
18	University of Alabama at Birmingham	Cancer 52%	79	82
19	Weill Medical College of Cornell University	Cancer 43%	79	80
20	Johns Hopkins University	Cancer 29%	77	77
21	Wake Forest University Health Sciences	Cancer 68%	74	74
22	NYU Langone Health	Cancer 45%	71	73
23	University of Chicago	Cancer 69%	70	72
24	UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center	Cancer 100%	69	72
25	University of Florida	Cancer 58%	69	69

How to read this

Lead sponsors only. ClinicalTrials.gov records one lead sponsor per trial, and that is what we count. Collaborators are not captured, so an organization's real involvement in clinical research is larger than the number shown here. A hospital that hosts a pharmaceutical company's trial at its site does not appear as the sponsor of that trial.

US trials versus worldwide. The ranking counts trials with at least one recruiting site in the United States, which is what the rest of this site indexes. Organizations that run large trial programs entirely outside the US do not appear, however many trials they run.

Recruiting only. Trials that have finished enrolling are excluded. This is a picture of what is open now, not a history of what an organization has ever run.

Figures come from the public ClinicalTrials.gov registry and are refreshed monthly. See the monthly reports for how the pipeline is changing over time.