# A public registry of stalled academic assets and shelved company compounds

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

## TL;DR

Thousands of cancer compounds that stopped development for portfolio rather than scientific reasons sit unused in university freezers and company archives. A public catalogue listing each asset's mechanism, stage, data, reason for stopping and licensing contact, with a standard research licence and a brokerage function, would let academic and non-profit developers adopt them.

## Summary

A searchable registry where universities and companies list oncology assets that have stopped development (with mechanism, stage reached, available data, reason for stopping and licensing contact), coupled with a standard non-exclusive research licence and a small brokerage function to match assets with academic groups or non-profit developers. NCATS's discontinued assets programme and AstraZeneca's open innovation portal are partial precedents; the National Cancer Institute's NExT programme has taken up some shelved compounds. Most stopped programmes end for portfolio, not scientific, reasons, and their data are otherwise lost.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: A registry with standard licences results in at least twenty stalled oncology assets entering new academic or non-profit development within three years, and at least two reaching a new clinical trial.
- Rationale: The NCATS pilot with shelved industry compounds led to new indications entering trials within a few years; the constraint was discovery of what existed and negotiation time, both of which a registry with standard terms removes.
- Proposed test: Launch with commitments from five companies and ten universities to list assets; count downstream licences and trials over three years.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: data

## Sources

- NCI Experimental Therapeutics (NExT) Program: https://next.cancer.gov/

## Connected records

- ideas: [A non-profit pharmaceutical company for the cancers markets ignore](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-nonprofit-pharma/), [A single oncology trial data trust with mandatory deposit within eighteen months](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-trial-data-trust/), [Automatic offer of shelved cancer assets to non-profits after two years](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-fund-shelved-asset-escrow/)
- bottlenecks: [Failures are hidden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-negative-results/), [Secrecy and intellectual property block collaboration](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-ip-collaboration/), [The valley of death between lab and product](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-translational-valley/)

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