# Judge funding programme officers on burden alignment and trials completed

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

## TL;DR

The people who run funding programmes are judged on money moved and papers produced. Judge them instead on whether their portfolios match the burden of disease and whether the trials they fund finish.

## Summary

Funders change the performance framework for programme staff and study sections: portfolio burden alignment, share of funded trials completing on time and publishing, replication rates of funded findings, data-sharing compliance and patient-relevant outcomes reached. Publish these metrics per programme. This is an inexpensive governance change that alters what gets steered towards funding without changing peer review itself.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Programmes whose officers are assessed on burden alignment and trial completion show measurable portfolio shift and higher trial completion within two funding cycles compared with programmes on conventional metrics.
- Rationale: Incentives for intermediaries shape outcomes in development finance and venture capital; in science funding they have been left implicit. Trial non-completion runs at a fifth or more of academic oncology trials, and this is rarely counted against the programme that funded them.
- Proposed test: One funder adopts the metrics for half of its programmes (chosen at random) and compares portfolio and completion changes with the other half after two cycles.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: policy

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Funding follows fashion, not burden): Carter & Nguyen, A comparison of cancer burden and research spending (BMC Cancer 2012): https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2407-12-526

## Connected records

- ideas: [Burden-weighted portfolio targets for every major cancer funder](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-burden-weighted-portfolio/), [Pay investigators for finishing and publishing trials, not for enrolling patients](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-trial-completion-bonus/)
- institutions: [Cancer Research UK](https://onco.cc/institutions/cruk/), [National Cancer Institute (NIH)](https://onco.cc/institutions/nci/)
- bottlenecks: [Funding follows fashion, not burden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-funding-allocation/), [Incentives reward me-too drugs and marginal gains](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-incentive-misalignment/)
- key papers: [Benefits of hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy for patients with serosal invasion in gastric cancer: a meta-analysis of the randomized controlled trials](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-sun-bmc-cancer/)

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