ideasIdea
Public post-mortem reports when a cancer drug programme is stopped
When an aeroplane crashes, an independent report explains why so it does not happen again. When a cancer drug programme is abandoned, nothing is written. Change that.
Programme discontinuations are announced in earnings calls with a sentence. A structured termination report (target and mechanism, models used, what was predicted versus observed in humans, pharmacokinetics achieved, toxicities, the decision rationale, and lessons) published within twelve months of discontinuation, under a standard template, would turn each failure into shared learning. Precedents: aviation safety reporting, and the few published examples such as the analysis of the anti-CD47 and Rova-T programmes.
Hypothesis
Regular publication of termination reports will reduce the number of subsequent programmes against the same target with the same failure mode by at least a third, measurable in pipeline databases over five years.
Rationale
Each failure carries information about targets, models and endpoints that the next entrant lacks. Duplicated failures against IDO1, CD47 and DLL3 ADCs show the cost of silence.
What would test it
Persuade three sponsors to publish reports for their next five discontinued oncology programmes; survey competitors and academics on whether the reports changed decisions.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
industry
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Failures are hidden · Negative trials, failed drugs and abandoned programmes are rarely published, so the same mistakes are repeated.
- 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.