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It takes an average of 15 years and millions of pounds to bring a new medicine to market. Whilst great care is taken to evaluate new treatments on adults, the process for testing medicines for children is much more tightly regulated and all research protocols must be submitted for Ethics Committee / Institutional Review Board (IRB) scrutiny and approval before trials can even start. Furthermore, the ethical and research needs of children are very different from that of adults, and paediatric clinical trials need to be tailored to the patient group as well as the disease and therapeutic area. Approximately 50% of the drugs on the European market have not been specially tested on children and this can lead to adverse effects, many of which can be fatal. With the recent implementation of the European Medicines for Children Regulation, pharmaceutical companies are under immense pressure to ensure they run their paediatric clinical trials effectively and efficiently.