As mentioned above, the caveats with analysing ADEV are that a) as a strict category it is largely 'dark' in CI databases, b) progression is usually associated with some type of commercial collaboration and c) many ADEV units were only set up recently compared with the CDEV decade-plus development times Phase III, and 88% NDA/biologics license application (BLA) phase. At first sight this looks encouragingly glass-half-full (e.g. compared to Fig. ) but the constitutive problem is that neither publications nor CI sources enerate their progression statistics in exactly the same way (e.g. they may use different indication merges). However, the glass-half-empty message from this paper is encoded in Fig. . The academic going-it-alone success is dramatically lower (e.g. two Phase IIIs and no approvals at all) compared to industry collaboration. In the US, the intersection of CDEV and ADEV, including their statistics, has become a controversial topic. The arguments pivot around the idea that public-sector scientists (with the NIH being the major funder) perform basic research on mechanisms of disease and points of intervention (but not ADEV at this early stage) whereas commercial organisations have performed the applied research that results in the discovery of drugs for the treatment of diseases and have carried out the CDEV activities to bring them to market. The bone of contention is that too little of the profits (i.e. from ~$30 billion but not all US companies) have fed back into public-funded research (that could of course boost ADEV). However, the boundaries between public and private sectors have shifted substantially since the biotech boom.