OnCo
ideasIdea

A single oncology trial data trust with mandatory deposit within eighteen months

Every cancer trial's anonymised patient-level data would go into one trusted repository within eighteen months of completion, with a single access committee, so researchers can re-analyse, pool and learn from trials that today stay locked up.

Consolidate the existing sharing platforms (Vivli, Project Data Sphere, YODA, ClinicalStudyDataRequest) into a single oncology data trust with a legal duty to deposit individual participant data, protocols and analysis code within eighteen months of primary completion for all trials whose results support a regulatory decision or that receive public funding. One independent access committee, standard data formats (CDISC), a secure analysis environment and a public catalogue. Trials in oncology already have among the highest voluntary sharing rates but access remains slow and fragmented, and negative or discontinued trials are rarely deposited at all.

Hypothesis
Mandatory deposit raises the proportion of registration oncology trials with accessible individual participant data from a minority to above 80% within three years, and the median time from request to data access falls below sixty days.
Rationale
The EMA's clinical data publication policy and the ICMJE data-sharing statement requirement increased availability without harming sponsors; pooled analyses from shared data (for example Project Data Sphere control-arm analyses) have already produced prognostic tools and answered questions no single trial could.
What would test it
A group of funders and one regulator make deposit a condition of funding and approval for two years; measure deposit compliance, access time and the number of secondary analyses published.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
data
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
3
Bottlenecks it attacks
  • Secrecy and intellectual property block collaboration · Companies with complementary drugs rarely test them together, and data that could answer questions stays locked up.
  • Failures are hidden · Negative trials, failed drugs and abandoned programmes are rarely published, so the same mistakes are repeated.
  • Data silos · Records, scans, genomes and outcomes sit in separate systems that cannot talk. Every patient's experience is lost to the next.

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