ideasIdea
A shared compound library that rare cancer researchers can actually use
Companies hold thousands of well-characterised drugs that could help rare cancers, but each request takes a year of legal negotiation. One standing agreement would unblock it.
Academic rare cancer groups routinely fail to obtain clinical-grade compound for investigator-initiated trials because material transfer and intellectual property negotiation exceed the capacity of small teams. A pre-negotiated multi-company access pool — standard terms, a single application route, an independent scientific review committee and mandatory data return — would industrialise access. Precedents exist in structural genomics consortia and in some public-private compound-sharing schemes.
Hypothesis
A standing access pool with standard terms reduces median time from request to compound receipt from over 12 months to under 3, and increases investigator-initiated rare cancer trials measurably within three years.
Rationale
Open science consortia have shown that pre-agreed standard terms remove the dominant transaction cost in cross-institution collaboration. Companies gain rare-indication data at almost no cost and retain their commercial position.
What would test it
Recruit five companies and 20 compounds into a pilot pool, then publish the median time to access and the number of trials initiated in the first two years.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
industry
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
5
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Rare and paediatric cancers without markets · Taken together rare cancers are a fifth of all cancers, but each one alone is too small for a company to invest in.
- Secrecy and intellectual property block collaboration · Companies with complementary drugs rarely test them together, and data that could answer questions stays locked up.
- The valley of death between lab and product · Most academic discoveries die before anyone tests them in people because nobody funds the middle step.