Scale up public drug development that takes academic assets to phase 1
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.
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).
- The valley of death between lab and product · Most academic discoveries die before anyone tests them in people because nobody funds the middle step.
- The undruggable drivers · The proteins that drive most cancers, such as MYC, mutant p53 and most RAS variants, still have no good drug.