OnCo
ideasIdea

A commons of shelved cancer drugs with their full data, open to new hypotheses

Companies stop developing many drugs that were safe but did not work in the disease they tried. Sharing those drugs and their data lets others test them where they might work.

The NCATS New Therapeutic Uses programme, the AstraZeneca Open Innovation portfolio and the Medical Research Council industry asset-sharing scheme have shown that shelved compounds can be repurposed when made available with their data. An oncology-focused commons with a searchable catalogue of discontinued assets (mechanism, human pharmacokinetics, safety database, reasons for discontinuation) and template access terms would systematise this.

Hypothesis
At least ten discontinued oncology assets will enter new investigator-initiated trials within three years of the commons opening, at least one reaching a positive randomised result within seven years.
Rationale
Many failures are indication failures, not molecule failures. Human safety data is the most expensive thing a shelved drug carries, and it is wasted when the drug sits on a shelf.
What would test it
Launch with five sponsors contributing twenty assets; track access requests, trials started and outcomes.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
industry
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
3
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

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Pages like this

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ideas

2
Public post-mortem reports when a cancer drug programme is stoppedRescue the biological samples from failed trials for biomarker research

collections

1
DrugBank & ChEMBL

bottlenecks

2
Failures are hiddenThe valley of death between lab and product