Bay Area drug makers tackling hundreds of clinical trials

This is the heart of the life sciences industry, with hundreds of companies, scores of drugs, devices and therapeutics on the market and gobs (that's not the scientific term) of clinical trials.

As you might guess, that can be difficult to track on a daily basis. Who's Phase I trial is going into Phase II when? Which Bay Area companies have ALS drugs in the clinic? Wasn't someone working on a drug to treat oral mucositis?

So last year we built an online database, mainly from information available on company websites, that allowed readers to quickly search what Bay Area biopharma companies were working on, by body part or company name or disease indication.

We took that another step this year. Parsing the wealth of data at ClinicalTrials.gov, we found more than 400 active, human trials by Bay Area companies. It was an eye-rubbing undertaking over a couple of weeks in April, but awe-inspiring as well when you consider the industry's trouble in getting many investors to believe in what the companies are doing.

See the database here.