Response on 1b pace. More clinics?Responding to the question on how long a 1b could drag on, while I have no answer and everything seems to be longer, I do notice that it's about 50/50 between much larger 1a/1b number of study locations according to a sample from MD Anderson site and looking at their clinicalgov site. I'm counting "larger" as >10 study locations.
Some have a lot and they're small companies. Here's one for Five Prime Therapeutics and they have 18 sites, with some in Korea
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03514121
There's too many for me to really see what the averages are. I looked at just the docetaxol ones and you get guys like AbbVie with 35 locations around the world, all recruiting now. There's also a Pfizer one with 35 sites in US with about half recruiting.
I don't know their plans or what budget issues are, but I would hope they expand from the current 5 study sites, with only 4 recruiting. They probably need to double or triple the study sites for 1b, and then double again for 2 and beyond depending on the plan.
As pointed out, showing the clinics you have a highly interesting and potentially highly effective treatment would make that easy. If not, could be hard. Time is of the essence, so the more study sites, the quicker the data collection goes. Crank it up if you need to. That could be one of the major ATM functions -- expanding study sites.