Regulatory Incentives for Innovation: The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation

Regulators of new products confront a tradeoff between speeding a product to market and collecting additional product quality information. The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) provides an opportunity to understand if regulators can use new policy to innovate around this tradeoff. We find that the BTD program shortened clinical development times by 23 percent and did not impact the ex post safety profile of drugs with the designation. The BTD program had the greatest impact on less experienced firms and reduced clinical trial design complexity. The results suggest that targeted regulatory innovation can shorten R&D periods without compromising product quality.