# Scale up public drug development that takes academic assets to phase 1

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

## TL;DR

The US government already runs a small programme that turns academic cancer discoveries into drugs ready for human trials. Scale it up tenfold and copy it in other countries.

## Summary

NCI's Experimental Therapeutics (NExT) programme and the Cancer Research UK Centre for Drug Development show that public bodies can run medicinal chemistry, pharmacology and IND-enabling work on academic targets and then license candidates to companies. Both are small relative to the pipeline of stranded academic discoveries. The proposal is to expand these to tens of concurrent programmes each, prioritising undruggable and neglected targets, with explicit licensing-out at phase 1 or 2 and revenue returning to the programme. Public development is also the natural home for assets with no commercial sponsor (rare cancers, generics, combinations of competitors' drugs).

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: A tenfold expansion of public drug development capacity brings at least fifteen academically-originated oncology candidates to phase 1 per year within six years and results in at least five licences to industry on terms that recover a meaningful share of costs.
- Rationale: NExT has progressed multiple agents to the clinic and licensed several; CRUK's centre has taken dozens of agents into humans and contributed to approved drugs (including through its early support of PARP inhibitor and abiraterone development). The model works at small scale; the question is whether it scales, which the pilot tests.
- Proposed test: Fund an expansion tranche of ten new programmes with public milestone reporting and compare progression and licensing rates with the historical programme baseline.
- Maturity: early-clinical
- Actor: policy

## Sources

- NCI NExT Program: https://next.cancer.gov/

## Connected records

- ideas: [A non-profit pharmaceutical company for the cancers markets ignore](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-nonprofit-pharma/), [Regional translational institutes with academic GMP suites and IND teams](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-translational-institutes-gmp/)
- institutions: [Cancer Research UK](https://onco.cc/institutions/cruk/), [National Cancer Institute (NIH)](https://onco.cc/institutions/nci/), [The Institute of Cancer Research](https://onco.cc/institutions/icr-london/)
- people: [Christopher Lord](https://onco.cc/people/chris-lord/), [Paul Workman](https://onco.cc/people/paul-workman/)
- bottlenecks: [The undruggable drivers](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-undruggable-targets/), [The valley of death between lab and product](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-translational-valley/)

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