ideasIdea
A public dashboard of research money per death for every cancer
A simple website that shows, every year, how much research money each cancer receives compared with how many people it kills, so the gaps are impossible to ignore.
Combine machine-readable grant data (NIH RePORTER, the International Cancer Research Partnership, UKRI Gateway to Research, EU CORDIS, and charity annual reports) with mortality and DALY data to publish research dollars per death, per DALY and per incident case, by cancer type and by Common Scientific Outline category (biology, prevention, detection, treatment, survivorship). Include a trend line and a 'what would burden-weighted look like' comparison. Cheap, because most of the data are already public; the value is the persistent, cited visibility.
Hypothesis
Annual publication of a widely-cited dollars-per-death ranking shifts relative funding: within five years the coefficient of variation of spend per death across the 15 most common cancers falls measurably, and funders cite the dashboard in strategy documents.
Rationale
League tables change behaviour when they are public and persistent: hospital mortality reporting, university rankings and the Access to Medicine Index all altered institutional priorities. Cancer-specific funding gap analyses appear as one-off papers and are forgotten; a living dashboard is not.
What would test it
Build the dashboard from public sources in under a year; measure media citations, funder strategy citations and changes in spend allocation over three cycles against a pre-registered prediction of no change.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
data
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
1
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Funding follows fashion, not burden · Money goes to the cancers and questions that are easy or popular, not the ones that kill most or where a dollar would do most.
- 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.