{"entity":{"id":"idea-fund-target-validation-consortium","kind":"idea","name":"A pre-competitive consortium to validate or kill academic targets before licensing","aka":[],"tldr":"Companies and public funders would jointly pay for standardised experiments that confirm or refute new cancer targets, sharing all results openly, so nobody wastes years on a target that does not hold up.","summary":"A consortium modelled on the NIH Accelerating Medicines Partnership and Open Targets in which companies, funders and academic centres pool money to run standardised, blinded target validation (genetic dependency across large cell panels, in vivo knock-out in relevant models, human genetic and expression evidence, tool-compound pharmacology) on nominated academic oncology targets, with all data released publicly. Companies then compete downstream on chemistry and biology. This raises the quality of what enters the valley and removes duplicated validation efforts inside every company.","asOf":"2026-09-08","links":[{"label":"Accelerating Medicines Partnership","url":"https://www.nih.gov/research-training/accelerating-medicines-partnership-amp"},{"label":"Open Targets","url":"https://www.opentargets.org/"}],"tags":[],"related":["depmap","open-targets","idea-fund-precompetitive-undruggable-consortium","idea-fund-replication-set-aside"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":["crispr-screens","pdx-models"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-translational-valley","b-reproducibility","b-ip-collaboration"],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"hypothesis":"Targets that pass consortium validation progress to lead optimisation at twice the rate of unvalidated academic targets, and published consortium negative results reduce industry programmes started on refuted targets within two years of release.","rationale":"AMP has produced widely used open datasets in Alzheimer's disease and type 2 diabetes and is credited with shifting industry target choice; Open Targets and DepMap are already the first stop for oncology target triage. The remaining gap is standardised in vivo validation with open release.","test":"Pilot with five companies and two funders on twenty nominated targets; release results and track downstream programme starts and licensing of validated versus refuted targets over three years.","maturity":"early-clinical","actor":"industry","cost":"medium","horizonYears":4},"route":"/ideas/idea-fund-target-validation-consortium/","neighbours":{"collection":[{"id":"depmap","kind":"collection","name":"DepMap (Cancer Dependency Map)","route":"/collections/depmap/"},{"id":"open-targets","kind":"collection","name":"Open Targets Platform","route":"/collections/open-targets/"}],"idea":[{"id":"idea-fund-precompetitive-undruggable-consortium","kind":"idea","name":"An open-science consortium on the undruggable drivers, open until a candidate","route":"/ideas/idea-fund-precompetitive-undruggable-consortium/"},{"id":"idea-fund-replication-set-aside","kind":"idea","name":"Set aside 3% of grant budgets to replicate findings before translation","route":"/ideas/idea-fund-replication-set-aside/"}],"technology":[{"id":"crispr-screens","kind":"technology","name":"CRISPR functional genomics","route":"/technologies/crispr-screens/"},{"id":"pdx-models","kind":"technology","name":"Patient-derived xenografts","route":"/technologies/pdx-models/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-reproducibility","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Preclinical results do not reproduce","route":"/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/"},{"id":"b-ip-collaboration","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Secrecy and intellectual property block collaboration","route":"/bottlenecks/b-ip-collaboration/"},{"id":"b-translational-valley","kind":"bottleneck","name":"The valley of death between lab and product","route":"/bottlenecks/b-translational-valley/"}]}}