Record-breaking financings in 2018 trickled down to almost every therapeutic area, showing in many cases double- and triple-digit percent increases of funds flowing into biopharma companies working on everything from cell and gene therapies to cancer immunotherapies and microbiome therapeutics.

The use of contract research organizations (CROs) by drug developers has continued to grow at an 8 percent clip annually since 2010, reaching an estimated $86 billion in 2018, according to a new report from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD).