Paper
The pooled industry table hides where the backlog actually sits. Intervention family and geography both change the sponsor story.
Which industry sponsors keep reappearing once older CT.gov studies are split by intervention family rather than treated as one pooled industry backlog? We analysed 249,507 eligible older closed interventional studies from the March 29, 2026 full-registry snapshot and isolated industry-sponsored records with intervention families and country locations. The project compares sponsor-level missing-results counts, no-results rates, ghost-protocol rates, and geography contrasts across drug, device, procedure, biological, and dietary-supplement industry portfolios. In drug studies, GlaxoSmithKline carried 1,033 missing-results studies, ahead of Boehringer Ingelheim at 847 and AstraZeneca at 845. Industry procedure studies were smaller but still uneven, while industry no-results rates rose from 27.3 percent in mixed U.S.-plus-non-U.S. portfolios to 70.9 percent in no-U.S. portfolios and 65.9 percent in selected no-country records. Industry hiddenness therefore depends strongly on modality and geography, so a pooled industry leaderboard understates where backlog concentrates most severely. Industry, sponsor, and intervention labels are registry-entered fields rather than audited corporate, legal, or therapeutic classifications.