The US FDA approved 23 new drugs in the first 6 months of 2017 (Table 1). This is more than the agency approved in the entirety of 2016, a lacklustre year with only 22 approvals (Nat. Rev. Drug Discov. 16, 73–76; 2017).

Table 1 FDA approvals in the first 6 months of 2017
Full size table

The FDA tends to approve more drugs in the second half of the year than in the first, but this is not always the case. In 2016, it approved 13 in the first half of the year and the other 9 in the second.