{"entity":{"id":"idea-moon-negative-results-ledger","kind":"idea","name":"A global ledger of negative results and failed compounds with mandatory deposition","aka":[],"tldr":"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.","asOf":"2026-09-08","links":[{"label":"Bottleneck evidence (Failures are hidden): Anderson et al., Compliance with results reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov (NEJM 2015)","url":"https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsa1409364"}],"tags":[],"related":[],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-negative-results","b-reproducibility","b-ip-collaboration"],"keyPapers":["paper-anderson-n-engl-j-med"],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"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.","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","cost":"medium","horizonYears":3},"route":"/ideas/idea-moon-negative-results-ledger/","neighbours":{"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-negative-results","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Failures are hidden","route":"/bottlenecks/b-negative-results/"},{"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/"}],"paper":[{"id":"paper-anderson-n-engl-j-med","kind":"paper","name":"Compliance with results reporting at ClinicalTrials.gov","route":"/key-papers/paper-anderson-n-engl-j-med/"}]}}