A machine-readable taxonomy of why cancer drugs fail
Drugs fail for very different reasons: the target was wrong, the drug did not reach it, the side-effects were too bad, or the trial was badly designed. Recording which reason each time would show where the system is broken.
Analyses of attrition (for example those published by AstraZeneca and Pfizer on their own pipelines) show that failure reasons are learnable but rarely recorded consistently. A shared taxonomy (target biology, exposure, safety, efficacy in unselected population, biomarker failure, design, commercial) applied to every discontinued oncology programme in public pipeline databases would enable system-level diagnosis and comparison across sponsors and decades.
- Failures are hidden · Negative trials, failed drugs and abandoned programmes are rarely published, so the same mistakes are repeated.
- The valley of death between lab and product · Most academic discoveries die before anyone tests them in people because nobody funds the middle step.
Pages like this
not linked directly; found by shared links- IdeaA commons of shelved cancer drugs with their full data, open to new hypotheses
Shares Public post-mortem reports when a cancer drug programme is stopped, The valley of death between lab and product, Failures are hidden.
- IdeaListed companies must disclose top-line data, not just 'did not meet endpoint'
Shares Public post-mortem reports when a cancer drug programme is stopped, Failures are hidden.
- IdeaLiving systematic reviews of animal and organoid evidence before every new trial
Shares Score every preclinical model by how often it predicted the clinical result, Failures are hidden.
- ProductRovalpituzumab tesirine
Shares Public post-mortem reports when a cancer drug programme is stopped, Failures are hidden.
- ProductEpacadostat
Shares Public post-mortem reports when a cancer drug programme is stopped, Failures are hidden.
- IdeaA registry for preclinical experiments that did not work
Shares A target de-risking index that counts failures as well as successes, Failures are hidden.
- IdeaA public registry of stalled academic assets and shelved company compounds
Shares The valley of death between lab and product, Failures are hidden.
- CollectionOpen Targets Platform
Shares A target de-risking index that counts failures as well as successes, The valley of death between lab and product.