ideasIdea

A home for the animal and organoid experiments that failed

Failed laboratory experiments are rarely published, so other teams repeat them. A searchable place to deposit them would save years of duplicated work.

A structured repository for negative or null preclinical results, with a minimal reporting template (model, agent, dose, endpoint, effect size, confidence interval), digital object identifiers so deposits are citable, and funder credit for deposition. Existing journals for negative results have failed because they carry no career value; funder mandates and citable deposits change that calculus.

Hypothesis

A funder-mandated repository accumulates enough deposits in three years that documented duplicate-effort avoidance and meta-analytic corrections to published effect sizes can be demonstrated.

Rationale

Meta-research consistently shows that a large fraction of preclinical oncology findings do not replicate; the missing data are not lost, they are unpublished and sitting on hard drives.

What would test it

One large funder requires deposition as a condition of final report sign-off for three years; measure deposit rate, reuse, and effect-size shifts in updated meta-analyses.

Maturity

speculative

Who has to act

philanthropy

Cost to try

Small (under $1M)

Years to first evidence

Bottlenecks it attacks

Preclinical models that do not predict people · Nine in ten cancer drugs that work in mice fail in humans. Our models are the reason.
Failures are hidden · Negative trials, failed drugs and abandoned programmes are rarely published, so the same mistakes are repeated.
Preclinical results do not reproduce · Fewer than half of landmark cancer biology findings reproduce when someone else tries.

Connected

5top

Pages like this

not linked directly; found by shared links

institutions

Cancer Research UK National Cancer Institute (NIH)

bottlenecks

Failures are hidden Preclinical models that do not predict people Preclinical results do not reproduce