OnCo
ideasIdea

Mandatory machine-readable portfolio reporting for all large cancer funders

Every funder that spends more than $50 million a year on cancer research would publish what it funds in a shared, coded database, so gaps and duplication can be seen across the whole system.

The International Cancer Research Partnership already codes members' portfolios by cancer type and Common Scientific Outline category, but participation is voluntary and misses most industry-funded academic work, Chinese and many European funders. Governments and umbrella bodies would require reporting as a condition of charitable tax status or public co-funding, with a common ontology, award-level data and outputs linked (publications, trials, patents). Coverage is what turns a nice database into a planning tool.

Hypothesis
Raising portfolio-registry coverage above 80% of global non-industry cancer research spend enables at least three documented cases per year where funders reallocate or co-fund to fill identified gaps or eliminate duplication.
Rationale
Coded portfolio analysis has already exposed funding imbalances in the UK and US; the missing piece is coverage and enforcement. Clinical trial registration went from voluntary and patchy to near-universal once journals and regulators made it mandatory.
What would test it
One country mandates reporting for two years; measure coverage, the number of gap analyses produced and documented reallocation decisions citing the registry.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
data
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks
  • Funding follows fashion, not burden · Money goes to the cancers and questions that are easy or popular, not the ones that kill most or where a dollar would do most.
  • Data silos · Records, scans, genomes and outcomes sit in separate systems that cannot talk. Every patient's experience is lost to the next.

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