The productivity of CDEV can be viewed through different lenses. These include shareholder profits, number of quality-adjusted patient years achieved or even the continued health authority cost-saving transitions to generics and over-the-counter medicines. However, the most commonly used metric is counting the number of drug approvals. These outputs are officially collated and declared by the FDA and the EMA, with the most recent cumulative set from the former being shown below in Fig. . There is an encouraging upward trend in Fig. and a detailed analysis is presented in this blogpost on the 2018 structures in PubChem. As usual, a number of pundits (referenced in the blogpost) have pronounced their judgments on this annual harvest. Those from Munos are most relevant and can be perceived as encouraging for the theme of ADEV. He interprets the increasing proportion of SMEs as signs that having to work at 'big pharma scale' is no longer so essential (although despite the desirability of new drugs for very rare diseases they have lower impact on population health). He goes further to suggest the increasing commodification of big science will mean that future development successes may come from scientist's ability to extract knowledge from open data (and by implication ADEV teams who can engage with this). However, it has to be noted that no academic-only drugs have appeared in the years covered by Fig. , emphasising the necessity of commercial support to achieve FDA approval. Another recent publication from Clavariate ('Trends in clinical success rates and therapeutic focus', 2019, PMID 31267067) distils data from ~30 large, mid-sized and small companies draws similar conclusions but complements these with a useful seven-year breakdown by therapeutic area shown in Fig. .