When studying a new drug, it can sometimes take many years to learn whether a drug actually provides a real effect on how a patient survives, feels, or functions. A positive therapeutic effect that is clinically meaningful in the context of a given disease is known as “clinical benefit”. Mindful of the fact that it may take an extended period of time to measure a drug’s intended clinical benefit, in 1992 FDA instituted the Accelerated Approval regulations. These regulations allowed drugs for serious conditions that filled an unmet medical need to be approved based on a surrogate endpoint. Using a surrogate endpoint enabled the FDA to approve these drugs faster.