A pre-competitive consortium to validate or kill academic targets before licensing
Companies and public funders would jointly pay for standardised experiments that confirm or refute new cancer targets, sharing all results openly, so nobody wastes years on a target that does not hold up.
A consortium modelled on the NIH Accelerating Medicines Partnership and Open Targets in which companies, funders and academic centres pool money to run standardised, blinded target validation (genetic dependency across large cell panels, in vivo knock-out in relevant models, human genetic and expression evidence, tool-compound pharmacology) on nominated academic oncology targets, with all data released publicly. Companies then compete downstream on chemistry and biology. This raises the quality of what enters the valley and removes duplicated validation efforts inside every company.
- The valley of death between lab and product · Most academic discoveries die before anyone tests them in people because nobody funds the middle step.
- Preclinical results do not reproduce · Fewer than half of landmark cancer biology findings reproduce when someone else tries.
- Secrecy and intellectual property block collaboration · Companies with complementary drugs rarely test them together, and data that could answer questions stays locked up.