you develop a drug that will work on a couple of different diseases (or, more likely, different cancers) You can only afford to run a clinical trial on one dise

you develop a drug that will work on a couple of different diseases (or, more likely, different cancers) You can only afford to run a clinical trial on one disease. How do you choose? You hire a company who has a good handle on data (A lot of which is gathered by the CDC and other government orgs who make it freely available.) The data people mine that data and come back to say, "x% more people die from disease 1 than 2, but insurance will reimburse more for disease 2, so go with 2." - totally making that up, but it is something you could feasibly derive from the data. Mostly it was along the lines of "teens get acne, american teens would rather use a pill than a cream so develop a pill for them, cream for the rest of the world."