ideasIdea
An open model bank for the rare tumours nobody has models for
You cannot study a cancer without a laboratory model of it, and most rare cancers have none. A funded bank that makes and shares models would unlock research.
Rare tumour research stalls because there is no cell line, organoid or xenograft to work with, and individual laboratories cannot justify the cost of derivation for a disease they may study once. A central derivation facility taking fresh surgical material from a referral network, generating organoids and xenografts, characterising them and distributing them openly on a cost-recovery basis would remove the barrier for hundreds of diseases at once.
Hypothesis
A central facility can derive usable models for at least half of attempted rare tumour cases and distribute over 200 characterised models within five years, measurably increasing publications and drug programmes in those diseases.
Rationale
Shared model repositories have driven whole fields, and dependency map projects showed that model availability, not ideas, determines what gets studied. Rare tumour surgery already generates the tissue, which is currently discarded.
What would test it
A two-year pilot with three referral centres reporting derivation success rate by histology, cost per model, and external requests served.
Maturity
preclinical evidence
Who has to act
philanthropy
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
6
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Rare and paediatric cancers without markets · Taken together rare cancers are a fifth of all cancers, but each one alone is too small for a company to invest in.
- Preclinical models that do not predict people · Nine in ten cancer drugs that work in mice fail in humans. Our models are the reason.
- The valley of death between lab and product · Most academic discoveries die before anyone tests them in people because nobody funds the middle step.