# A RECOVERY-style permanent platform trial of cheap drugs added to cancer care

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-reg-recovery-style-platform-repurposing/  
OnCo record `idea-reg-recovery-style-platform-repurposing` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

The UK's RECOVERY trial answered questions about dexamethasone and other cheap COVID drugs within months by randomising tens of thousands of ordinary hospital patients with a two-page consent and routine-data follow-up. Cancer needs the same permanent platform to test generics such as statins, metformin, aspirin and propranolol added to standard care.

## Summary

RECOVERY enrolled tens of thousands of patients with a two-page consent, minimal data collection and routine-data follow-up, delivering definitive answers on dexamethasone and others within months. Oncology has platform trials (GBM AGILE, STAMPEDE, I-SPY) but none dedicated to repurposed generics across common cancers. The proposal is a perpetual pragmatic platform in one or more national health systems, embedded in routine care, randomising patients with common cancers to standard care with or without a generic candidate (statin, metformin, propranolol, aspirin, vitamin D, low-dose naltrexone, itraconazole and others), with survival from registries as the primary outcome and arms added and dropped on interim analyses.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: The platform randomises at least 5,000 patients a year at a per-patient cost under $500 and delivers a definitive answer on at least one candidate every 18 months.
- Rationale: The cost of a conventional phase 3 trial, not scientific uncertainty, is why repurposing questions remain open; routine-data platforms cut that cost by an order of magnitude and STAMPEDE showed the design works in oncology.
- Proposed test: Fund a two-year set-up in one national system with three initial arms; report enrolment, cost per patient and time to first interim analysis.
- Maturity: early-clinical
- Actor: research

## Sources

- RECOVERY trial: https://www.recoverytrial.net/

## Connected records

- institutions: [Cancer Research UK](https://onco.cc/institutions/cruk/)
- terms: [Basket, umbrella, and platform trials](https://onco.cc/terms/basket-umbrella-platform/), [Overall survival (OS)](https://onco.cc/terms/os/)
- bottlenecks: [No incentive to repurpose cheap drugs](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-generic-repurposing/), [Trial design, endpoints and cost](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-trial-design/)
- roadmaps: [Trial modernisation roadmap: the randomised trial → platforms and adaptive designs → decentralised, pragmatic and always-on](https://onco.cc/roadmaps/trial-modernisation-roadmap/)

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