Cancer is the most dangerous noncommunicable disease. It causes nine million people deaths per year, and patients
need effective drugs to cure it, so how to improve its success rate becomes a major issue. We explore whether an
organization that develops radical or incremental drugs has more opportunities to succeed. We also try to ascertain
whether social capital embedded in health networks is an important channel to foster the impact of radicalness on
the success of drug development. To this end, this paper provides a new method to link indicators of radicalness
and success of drug development. We collect data about cancer clinical trials and classify drugs into molecular
entities and therapeutic biological products. The results show that in molecular entities development, the
organizations with radical drug development are more likely to get success. However, this relationship is not
significant in therapeutic biological product development. Social capital is a favorable source to increase the
success possibility of drug development, but it does not foster the impact of radicalness of drug development on
success. This research gives some theoretical contributions on the benefits of drug development for organizations
and provides some suggestions to organizations and policymakers on how to improve drug development in the field
of cancer disease.