# A guaranteed purchase prize for the first drug against a named hard target

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-bio1-undruggable-market-commitment/  
OnCo record `idea-bio1-undruggable-market-commitment` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Governments promised in advance to buy vaccines that did not yet exist, and they got made. The same promise could be made for a drug against a target everyone has given up on.

## Summary

Advance market commitments worked for pneumococcal vaccines and shaped COVID-19 vaccine supply. Applied to undruggable oncology targets, a public or philanthropic funder would commit to purchase a defined volume at a defined price for the first agent meeting a pre-specified efficacy bar against a designated target such as KRAS G12D in pancreatic cancer or gain-of-function mutant p53, with access conditions attached.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: A committed purchase guarantee of sufficient size measurably increases the number of active industrial programmes against the designated target within three years of announcement.
- Rationale: Investment in high-risk targets is limited by uncertain revenue rather than by scientific interest; demand-side instruments change that calculation without picking a technical approach.
- Proposed test: Announce one pilot commitment with a clear technical specification and independent adjudication, and count programme starts, patent filings and consortium formation against matched control targets over three years.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: policy

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (The undruggable drivers): Dang et al., Drugging the 'undruggable' cancer targets (Nature Reviews Cancer 2017): https://doi.org/10.1038/nrc.2017.36

## Connected records

- cancers: [Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma](https://onco.cc/cancers/pancreatic/)
- targets: [KRAS](https://onco.cc/targets/kras/), [TP53](https://onco.cc/targets/tp53/)
- bottlenecks: [Funding follows fashion, not burden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-funding-allocation/), [Incentives reward me-too drugs and marginal gains](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-incentive-misalignment/), [The undruggable drivers](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-undruggable-targets/)
- key papers: [Drugging the 'undruggable' cancer targets](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-dang-nat-rev-cancer/)
- roadmaps: [Drug discovery roadmap: screening in mice → maps of dependency → designing in silico](https://onco.cc/roadmaps/drug-discovery-roadmap/)

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