ideasIdea

Fund regulator-ready evidence dossiers for the 20 best-supported off-patent drugs

The evidence for old drugs against cancer is scattered across hundreds of papers. Assembling it into the format regulators and funders need is cheap and would speed decisions.

The Anticancer Fund's ReDO_DB and similar efforts catalogue candidates but stop short of the structured, regulator-grade dossiers (preclinical summary, pharmacology, safety in the target population, systematic review of clinical signals, proposed trial design) that a funder or a third-party label filing needs. The proposal is a funded programme, with methodologists and regulatory writers, that produces and publishes open dossiers for the 20 candidates with the strongest evidence, updated annually, each ending with a prioritised trial proposal and a regulatory strategy.

Hypothesis

Within three years, at least half of the dossiers lead to a funded trial or a regulatory or guideline submission, compared with a small minority of candidates in the current catalogue.

Rationale

Funders and regulators act on well-organised evidence; the marginal cost of a dossier is trivial against the cost of the trial it enables, and public dossiers prevent duplicated effort across countries.

What would test it

Produce the first ten dossiers, circulate to funders and regulators, and track downstream trial funding and submissions against ten matched candidates without dossiers.

Maturity

early clinical

Who has to act

philanthropy

Cost to try

Small (under $1M)

Years to first evidence

Bottlenecks it attacks

No incentive to repurpose cheap drugs · Old, cheap drugs with anti-cancer signals never get the trials they need because no one profits from the result.
Knowledge reaches practice too slowly · Knowledge diffusion is slow: it takes years for a proven result to change what most patients receive, and no one can keep up with the literature.

Connected

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bottlenecks

Knowledge reaches practice too slowly No incentive to repurpose cheap drugs