Book excerpt: Since the publication of the first edition in 2000, there has been an explosive growth of literature in biopharmaceutical research and development of new medicines. This encyclopedia (1) provides a comprehensive and unified presentation of designs and analyses used at different stages of the drug development process, (2) gives a well-balanced summary of current regulatory requirements, and (3) describes recently developed statistical methods in the pharmaceutical sciences. Features of the Fourth Edition: 1. 78 new and revised entries have been added for a total of 308 chapters and a fourth volume has been added to encompass the increased number of chapters. 2. Revised and updated entries reflect changes and recent developments in regulatory requirements for the drug review/approval process and statistical designs and methodologies. 3. Additional topics include multiple-stage adaptive trial design in clinical research, translational medicine, design and analysis of biosimilar drug development, big data analytics, and real world evidence for clinical research and development. 4. A table of contents organized by stages of biopharmaceutical development provides easy access to relevant topics. About the Editor: Shein-Chung Chow, Ph.D. is currently an Associate Director, Office of Biostatistics, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Chow is an Adjunct Professor at Duke University School of Medicine, as well as Adjunct Professor at Duke-NUS, Singapore and North Carolina State University. Dr. Chow is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics and the Chapman & Hall/CRC Biostatistics Book Series and the author of 28 books and over 300 methodology papers. He was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1995.