# Broad research consent as a routine step of the cancer pathway

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-data-consent-in-the-pathway/  
OnCo record `idea-data-consent-in-the-pathway` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Every newly diagnosed patient would be asked, as part of standard care, whether their data and leftover tissue can be used for research, so researchers never have to go back and ask.

## Summary

Cancer centres such as Memorial Sloan Kettering and the Princess Margaret already consent a majority of patients to institutional research protocols at first visit. The proposal is to make this a nationally standardised pathway step with a common consent text and a shared flag in the record, so that data from consented patients can be pooled across centres without re-consent. Ethics committees would recognise the common consent as sufficient for defined categories of research.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: A common pathway consent recognised by all ethics committees in a country will make more than 80 percent of new patients research-ready at diagnosis and remove re-consent as a barrier in more than 90 percent of retrospective studies.
- Rationale: Where institutions have made consent routine, enrolment rates above 70 percent are typical; the problem is that each institution's consent is unique and not recognised elsewhere.
- Proposed test: Agree a common consent text among five centres and one national ethics body; measure the share of patients research-ready and the number of multi-centre studies that proceed without re-consent over two years.
- Maturity: early-clinical
- Actor: clinic

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Data silos): AACR Project GENIE: https://www.aacr.org/professionals/research/aacr-project-genie/

## Connected records

- fronts: [AI & Computation](https://onco.cc/fronts/ai-computation/)
- institutions: [Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center](https://onco.cc/institutions/mskcc/), [Princess Margaret Cancer Centre](https://onco.cc/institutions/princess-margaret/)
- bottlenecks: [Data silos](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-data-silos/), [Trials enrol too few, too slowly](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-trial-enrolment/)

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