OnCo
ideasIdea

A global ledger of negative results and failed compounds with mandatory deposition

Every failed cancer drug, experiment and trial gets recorded in one open ledger, so nobody repeats a failure that has already cost years and millions.

Most preclinical negatives are never published, most discontinued compounds vanish with their data, and terminated trials often report nothing. The proposal is a ledger with structured entries (target, compound, model, endpoint, result, reason for stopping) required as a condition of public funding, journal publication and regulatory submission, with a safe harbour for industry deposition of discontinued asset data, and incentives (citations, credit) for negative-result deposition. Discontinued compounds with clean safety could be listed for repurposing.

Hypothesis
Within five years the ledger holds tens of thousands of negatives and measurably reduces duplicated preclinical programmes and trials of already-failed hypotheses, and yields repurposing candidates.
Rationale
Failure is the most common outcome and the least shared; a structured, required ledger corrects the publication bias that inflates hypotheses.
What would test it
Pilot with two funders and one company: measure deposition compliance, downstream citations and surveys of investigators who changed plans after consulting the ledger.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
policy
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
3
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

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