{"entity":{"id":"idea-bio1-negative-preclinical-repository","kind":"idea","name":"A home for the animal and organoid experiments that failed","aka":[],"tldr":"Failed laboratory experiments are rarely published, so other teams repeat them. A searchable place to deposit them would save years of duplicated work.","summary":"A structured repository for negative or null preclinical results, with a minimal reporting template (model, agent, dose, endpoint, effect size, confidence interval), digital object identifiers so deposits are citable, and funder credit for deposition. Existing journals for negative results have failed because they carry no career value; funder mandates and citable deposits change that calculus.","asOf":"2026-09-08","links":[{"label":"Bottleneck evidence (Lab models that fail to predict what happens in patients): Wong, Siah & Lo, Estimation of clinical trial success rates (Biostatistics 2019)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1093/biostatistics/kxx069"}],"tags":[],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":["cruk","nci"],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-preclinical-models","b-negative-results","b-reproducibility"],"keyPapers":["paper-wong-biostatistics"],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"hypothesis":"A funder-mandated repository accumulates enough deposits in three years that documented duplicate-effort avoidance and meta-analytic corrections to published effect sizes can be demonstrated.","rationale":"Meta-research consistently shows that a large fraction of preclinical oncology findings do not replicate; the missing data are not lost, they are unpublished and sitting on hard drives.","test":"One large funder requires deposition as a condition of final report sign-off for three years; measure deposit rate, reuse, and effect-size shifts in updated meta-analyses.","maturity":"speculative","actor":"philanthropy","cost":"small","horizonYears":3},"route":"/ideas/idea-bio1-negative-preclinical-repository/","neighbours":{"institution":[{"id":"cruk","kind":"institution","name":"Cancer Research UK","route":"/institutions/cruk/"},{"id":"nci","kind":"institution","name":"National Cancer Institute (NIH)","route":"/institutions/nci/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-negative-results","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Failures are hidden","route":"/bottlenecks/b-negative-results/"},{"id":"b-preclinical-models","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Lab models that fail to predict what happens in patients","route":"/bottlenecks/b-preclinical-models/"},{"id":"b-reproducibility","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Preclinical results do not reproduce","route":"/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/"}],"paper":[{"id":"paper-wong-biostatistics","kind":"paper","name":"Estimation of clinical trial success rates and related parameters","route":"/key-papers/paper-wong-biostatistics/"}]}}