# A global ledger of negative results and failed compounds with mandatory deposition

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

## TL;DR

Every failed cancer drug, experiment and trial gets recorded in one open ledger, so nobody repeats a failure that has already cost years and millions.

## Summary

Most preclinical negatives are never published, most discontinued compounds vanish with their data, and terminated trials often report nothing. The proposal is a ledger with structured entries (target, compound, model, endpoint, result, reason for stopping) required as a condition of public funding, journal publication and regulatory submission, with a safe harbour for industry deposition of discontinued asset data, and incentives (citations, credit) for negative-result deposition. Discontinued compounds with clean safety could be listed for repurposing.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Within five years the ledger holds tens of thousands of negatives and measurably reduces duplicated preclinical programmes and trials of already-failed hypotheses, and yields repurposing candidates.
- Rationale: Failure is the most common outcome and the least shared; a structured, required ledger corrects the publication bias that inflates hypotheses.
- Proposed test: Pilot with two funders and one company: measure deposition compliance, downstream citations and surveys of investigators who changed plans after consulting the ledger.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: policy

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Failures are hidden): Anderson et al., Compliance with results reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov (NEJM 2015): https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1409364

## Connected records

- bottlenecks: [Failures are hidden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-negative-results/), [Preclinical results do not reproduce](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/), [Secrecy and intellectual property block collaboration](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-ip-collaboration/)
- key papers: [Compliance with results reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-anderson-n-engl-j-med/)

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