2022 has been a rollercoaster year for biopharma, as it has faced an industry-wide slowdown and late-stage clinical trial failures, as well as breakthroughs and regulatory approvals. COVID-19 has continued to disrupt nearly all aspects of clinical trial infrastructure, from patient recruitment to supply chains, but despite this, 2023 promises to bring many new readouts from different branches of medicine (Table 1). We asked 11 leading experts for their top clinical trials to watch in the coming year.

A diabetes drug for Parkinson’s disease Roger Albin: For both purely scientific issues and clinical practice issues, the phase 3 trial for exenatide in Parkinson’s disease is a very attractive trial. It has the big advantage of being a repurposed drug that is already widely used in older patients. If there were a positive result, it is something that could be really adopted into clinical practice in a very practical way. The drug had reasonable preclinical data and some promising phase 2 data, and in the Parkinson’s disease world, in which there is not an animal model for really great predictive validity, this is probably about as good as it gets. The community is looking for unequivocal results, whether positive or negative. A clear positive response would be great, but a clear negative response is actually just as important.

Read PDF: 11 clinical trials that will shape medicine in 2023