# Multi-laboratory preclinical trials as the standard for go/no-go decisions

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-multilab-preclinical/  
OnCo record `idea-tr2-multilab-preclinical` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Instead of one lab's mouse study deciding whether a drug goes to patients, several labs run the same protocol independently, like a multi-centre clinical trial for mice.

## Summary

Multi-centre preclinical randomised trials (for example the Multi-PART stroke consortium and EQIPD in Europe) show that effect sizes shrink and heterogeneity appears when protocols are run across sites, exposing fragile findings before they reach patients. In oncology, a standing network of laboratories that runs pre-registered, blinded, multi-site efficacy studies for compounds approaching translation would replace single-lab evidence with robust estimates.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Effect sizes from multi-lab studies will predict early clinical activity better than the originating lab's results, and at least a third of compounds will show effects too small or inconsistent across sites to justify clinical testing.
- Rationale: Heterogeneity between sites is a feature: findings that survive it are the ones likely to survive human heterogeneity.
- Proposed test: Run ten compounds through a five-lab network with pre-registered protocols; compare effect sizes with the original publications and with subsequent clinical outcomes.
- Maturity: early-clinical
- Actor: research

## Sources

- EQIPD: https://eqipd.org/

## Connected records

- ideas: [Audit animal studies for randomisation and blinding, published by institution](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-arrive-audit/), [Independent replication of the key experiment before first-in-human academic trials](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-replication-before-ind/), [Top journals require an independent lab to reproduce key findings before publication](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-two-lab-rule/)
- companies: [Champions Oncology](https://onco.cc/companies/champions-oncology/)
- technologies: [Patient-derived xenografts](https://onco.cc/technologies/pdx-models/)
- bottlenecks: [Lab models that fail to predict what happens in patients](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-preclinical-models/), [Preclinical results do not reproduce](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/)

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