OnCo
ideasIdea

Multi-laboratory preclinical trials as the standard for go/no-go decisions

Instead of one lab's mouse study deciding whether a drug goes to patients, several labs run the same protocol independently, like a multi-centre clinical trial for mice.

Multi-centre preclinical randomised trials (for example the Multi-PART stroke consortium and EQIPD in Europe) show that effect sizes shrink and heterogeneity appears when protocols are run across sites, exposing fragile findings before they reach patients. In oncology, a standing network of laboratories that runs pre-registered, blinded, multi-site efficacy studies for compounds approaching translation would replace single-lab evidence with robust estimates.

Hypothesis
Effect sizes from multi-lab studies will predict early clinical activity better than the originating lab's results, and at least a third of compounds will show effects too small or inconsistent across sites to justify clinical testing.
Rationale
Heterogeneity between sites is a feature: findings that survive it are the ones likely to survive human heterogeneity.
What would test it
Run ten compounds through a five-lab network with pre-registered protocols; compare effect sizes with the original publications and with subsequent clinical outcomes.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
research
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
3
Bottlenecks it attacks

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