# An oncology patent pool for combination trials across companies

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-combination-patent-pool/  
OnCo record `idea-fund-combination-patent-pool` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Companies would put their cancer drugs into a shared licensing pool so that any qualified investigator can test combinations of drugs from different owners under one standard agreement, with royalties split by a fixed formula.

## Summary

A voluntary pool, administered by a neutral body on the model of the Medicines Patent Pool and the MPEG patent pools, in which participating companies grant a standard non-exclusive licence for their approved and late-stage oncology agents to be used in combination trials sponsored by academic groups, non-profits or other pool members, with pre-agreed terms for drug supply, data rights, publication and downstream royalty sharing if a combination is approved. Today each combination requires a bespoke negotiation that can take longer than the trial; pooled terms cut that to weeks. Regulators would recognise pool trials as acceptable for combination labelling.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: A pool with at least ten participating companies doubles the number of registered cross-company combination trials involving pooled agents within three years and reduces median contract negotiation time for such trials from over a year to under three months.
- Rationale: The Medicines Patent Pool has licensed dozens of HIV, hepatitis C and tuberculosis products through standard terms; standards-essential patent pools show competing firms can agree fixed royalty splits. Combination therapy is where most oncology benefit now comes from and where inter-company friction is greatest.
- Proposed test: Convene five companies and two academic networks to sign pool terms for a defined set of agents; measure trials initiated and negotiation time against the same companies' prior bilateral combination agreements.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: industry

## Sources

- Medicines Patent Pool: https://medicinespatentpool.org/

## Connected records

- ideas: [A legal right to obtain marketed cancer drugs at cost for combination trials](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-compulsory-combination-access/), [A permanent neutral non-profit sponsor for multi-company platform trials](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-neutral-platform-sponsor/), [A regulator-endorsed standard contract for inter-company combination trials](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-standard-combination-agreement/), [An antitrust safe harbour for cross-company combination trials and data pooling](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-antitrust-safe-harbour/), [University licences with royalties indexed to benefit and global access](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-global-access-licensing-royalties/)
- pairings: [ADC + checkpoint inhibitor](https://onco.cc/pairings/adc-plus-io/), [Radiotherapy + immunotherapy](https://onco.cc/pairings/radiation-plus-io/)
- bottlenecks: [Secrecy and intellectual property block collaboration](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-ip-collaboration/), [Too many combinations to test](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-combination-space/)

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