# Listed companies must disclose top-line data, not just 'did not meet endpoint'

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-material-failure-disclosure/  
OnCo record `idea-tr2-material-failure-disclosure` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

When a public company announces a trial failure, it should be required to give the actual numbers, as it must for a success.

## Summary

Securities regulators require disclosure of material events, and trial failures are material. Yet failure announcements typically omit effect sizes, confidence intervals and safety, which are routinely disclosed for successes. A securities-regulation rule that material trial announcements include a standard minimum data set (primary endpoint estimate with interval, key secondaries, serious adverse events) would put the numbers in the public record within days rather than years.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: After the rule, the median time from a phase 3 oncology failure to public availability of the primary effect estimate falls from over a year to under one month.
- Rationale: Investors and clinicians share an interest in the numbers; the asymmetry between success and failure disclosures is a choice, not a necessity. Existing rules on balanced disclosure provide a legal hook.
- Proposed test: Audit the last five years of oncology failure announcements for data content; propose a standard; pilot voluntary adoption with an industry body and measure uptake.
- 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

- ideas: [Public post-mortem reports when a cancer drug programme is stopped](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-termination-reports/)
- bottlenecks: [Failures are hidden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-negative-results/), [Incentives reward me-too drugs and marginal gains](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-incentive-misalignment/)
- key papers: [Compliance with results reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov](https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-anderson-n-engl-j-med/)
- 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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