# A registry for preclinical experiments that did not work

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

## TL;DR

Most lab experiments that fail are never written up, so other labs repeat them. A simple, structured registry with a citable record for each failed experiment would stop the waste.

## Summary

Negative preclinical findings (a drug that did not work in a model, a target that did not validate, a biomarker that did not predict) have no home. A registry with minimal structured fields (target, model, intervention, readout, result, methods link, raw data), each with a DOI, and integrated into the major databases, would make failures findable. Funders would require deposit for supported projects.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Within three years, at least 20% of active oncology labs in participating institutions deposit at least one record per year, and surveyed researchers report avoiding at least one planned experiment because of a registry entry.
- Rationale: The gene-target level bias is enormous: a handful of targets attract most papers, partly because negative results on them are invisible. Registries with low friction (such as bioRxiv for preprints) achieved rapid adoption once norms shifted.
- Proposed test: Launch with three funders requiring deposit; measure deposits, views and self-reported behaviour change after two years.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: research

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Failures are hidden): Anderson et al., Compliance with results reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov (NEJM 2015): https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1409364

## Connected records

- collections: [Open Targets Platform](https://onco.cc/collections/open-targets/), [PubMed & Europe PMC](https://onco.cc/collections/pubmed-europepmc/)
- ideas: [A funder-backed, indexed journal of negative and inconclusive cancer results](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-negative-results-journal/), [A target de-risking index that counts failures as well as successes](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-target-failure-index/), [Bounties for documented failed replications of high-impact findings](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-replication-bounties/), [Grant progress reports must list what did not work](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-null-result-reporting/), [Living systematic reviews of animal and organoid evidence before every new trial](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-preclinical-living-reviews/), [Small grants that pay scientists to write up abandoned projects](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-writeup-grants/)
- bottlenecks: [Failures are hidden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-negative-results/), [Preclinical results do not reproduce](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/)
- key papers: [Compliance with results reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-anderson-n-engl-j-med/)
- roadmaps: [Drug discovery roadmap: screening in mice → maps of dependency → designing in silico](https://onco.cc/roadmaps/drug-discovery-roadmap/)

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