# A fast IND-enabling fund that pays for toxicology and manufacturing in eight weeks

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-ind-enabling-fund/  
OnCo record `idea-fund-ind-enabling-fund` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

The studies needed before a first human trial cost a few million and no grant pays for them. A dedicated fund would decide in weeks and take a small share of any future revenue.

## Summary

A revolving fund, capitalised by philanthropy and public money, that pays for GLP toxicology, CMC development, formulation and regulatory writing for academic oncology candidates that have passed independent replication of the efficacy result the candidate rests on. Decisions in eight weeks by a standing expert panel; awards of $2 to $8 million; in return the fund takes a low single-digit royalty or a share of licensing revenue, recycled into the fund. Structured like the Wellcome Trust's Seeding Drug Discovery or the Michael J. Fox Foundation's therapeutic pipeline programme, but oncology-focused and paired with the translational institutes. Most academic assets stall exactly here because IND-enabling work is neither science (so not fundable by grants) nor de-risked enough for companies.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: A fund of $100 million enables at least twenty academic oncology candidates to file INDs within four years, of which at least a quarter are licensed or reach phase 2, with royalty and licensing returns covering more than a third of disbursements over ten years.
- Rationale: Seeding Drug Discovery and similar translational funds report that a substantial fraction of supported programmes attract industry partners; the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's programme returned billions from a comparable model. Speed matters because academic teams disperse and competitors move on during multi-year funding delays.
- Proposed test: Capitalise a pilot at $20 million, fund ten candidates with the eight-week process, and track INDs filed, licensing and time-to-decision against a historical academic cohort.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: philanthropy

## Sources

- Wellcome Trust: https://wellcome.org/

## Connected records

- ideas: [A diversified royalty pool that finances academic phase 1 trials across fifty assets](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-royalty-pool-academic-assets/), [A funded organoid and PDX panel as the go/no-go gate before IND-enabling money](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-organoid-translation-gate/), [A phase 0 fund to test academic compounds in humans with microdoses and imaging](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-phase-zero-fund/), [Milestone-based venture philanthropy with royalties recycled into the pipeline](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-milestone-venture-philanthropy/), [Public co-investment in first-in-class phase 1 with a royalty return](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-sovereign-first-in-class-coinvestment/), [Regional translational institutes with academic GMP suites and IND teams](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-translational-institutes-gmp/), [Set aside 3% of grant budgets to replicate findings before translation](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-replication-set-aside/)
- bottlenecks: [The valley of death between lab and product](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-translational-valley/)

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