{"entity":{"id":"idea-tr2-material-failure-disclosure","kind":"idea","name":"Listed companies must disclose top-line data, not just 'did not meet endpoint'","aka":[],"tldr":"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.","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":["idea-tr2-termination-reports"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":["b-negative-results","b-incentive-misalignment"],"keyPapers":["paper-anderson-n-engl-j-med"],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"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.","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","cost":"small","horizonYears":2},"route":"/ideas/idea-tr2-material-failure-disclosure/","neighbours":{"idea":[{"id":"idea-tr2-termination-reports","kind":"idea","name":"Public post-mortem reports when a cancer drug programme is stopped","route":"/ideas/idea-tr2-termination-reports/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-negative-results","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Failures are hidden","route":"/bottlenecks/b-negative-results/"},{"id":"b-incentive-misalignment","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Incentives reward me-too drugs and marginal gains","route":"/bottlenecks/b-incentive-misalignment/"}],"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/"}],"roadmap":[{"id":"trial-modernisation-roadmap","kind":"roadmap","name":"Trial modernisation roadmap: the randomised trial → platforms and adaptive designs → decentralised, pragmatic and always-on","route":"/roadmaps/trial-modernisation-roadmap/"}]}}