OnCo
ideasIdea

Listed companies must disclose top-line data, not just 'did not meet endpoint'

When a public company announces a trial failure, it should be required to give the actual numbers, as it must for a success.

Securities regulators require disclosure of material events, and trial failures are material. Yet failure announcements typically omit effect sizes, confidence intervals and safety, which are routinely disclosed for successes. A securities-regulation rule that material trial announcements include a standard minimum data set (primary endpoint estimate with interval, key secondaries, serious adverse events) would put the numbers in the public record within days rather than years.

Hypothesis
After the rule, the median time from a phase 3 oncology failure to public availability of the primary effect estimate falls from over a year to under one month.
Rationale
Investors and clinicians share an interest in the numbers; the asymmetry between success and failure disclosures is a choice, not a necessity. Existing rules on balanced disclosure provide a legal hook.
What would test it
Audit the last five years of oncology failure announcements for data content; propose a standard; pilot voluntary adoption with an industry body and measure uptake.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
policy
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

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ideas

1
Public post-mortem reports when a cancer drug programme is stopped

bottlenecks

2
Failures are hiddenIncentives reward me-too drugs and marginal gains