Secrecy and intellectual property block collaboration

Every biobank negotiates its own legal agreement for sharing tissue, which takes months. A shared standard template, like Creative Commons for samples, would let tissue and data move in days.

Blood and tissue samples collected in cancer trials are the best material for validating new tests, but most sit unused under contracts that make access impossible. A commons would make them available for approved research.

Hospitals could train shared AI models on all their patients' scans and records without any data leaving the building, and jointly own the results, if someone built and governed the network.

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.

If a company refuses to supply its approved drug for a well-designed independent trial combining it with a rival's drug, the law would let the trial buy it at manufacturing cost, with results shared back.

Radiotherapy may make immunotherapy work better, but the trials to test this are scattered and often small. One shared platform, run by radiotherapy groups with drugs supplied by several companies, would settle it faster.

Companies fear that testing a combination will hand a competitor a patent. A shared pool where combination patents are cross-licensed by default would remove the fear.

Platform trials that test several companies' drugs against one shared control arm, such as I-SPY 2, Lung-MAP, GBM AGILE and STAMPEDE, are each built from scratch by determined individuals. A permanent non-profit sponsor holding the protocol, control arm, statistics and data, with a standard entry contract for companies, would cut the launch of a new platform from years to months.

Companies, hospitals and funders would form a consortium, like the Structural Genomics Consortium or IMI, to train one multimodal AI on scans, slides, genomes and outcomes from millions of patients by federated training across dozens of health systems, with the data never leaving the hospitals. Members would share the base model and compete on applications built on it.

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.

No single company will spend a decade on a target that might be impossible. A shared, openly published effort across the twenty hardest targets spreads that risk.

Thousands of cancer compounds that stopped development for portfolio rather than scientific reasons sit unused in university freezers and company archives. A public catalogue listing each asset's mechanism, stage, data, reason for stopping and licensing contact, with a standard research licence and a brokerage function, would let academic and non-profit developers adopt them.

A government or charity holds stocks of experimental cancer drugs under standing agreements, so academic doctors can test combinations without negotiating with each company separately.

Most of the delay in testing two companies' drugs together is lawyers negotiating from scratch. A single standard agreement, blessed by regulators, would let them sign in weeks.

Companies hold thousands of well-characterised drugs that could help rare cancers, but each request takes a year of legal negotiation. One standing agreement would unblock it.

Thousands of patients have received standard treatment in the control arms of past trials. Pooling their anonymised data would let new trials borrow from them and randomise fewer patients to old treatments.

Every cancer trial's anonymised patient-level data would go into one trusted repository within eighteen months of completion, with a single access committee, so researchers can re-analyse, pool and learn from trials that today stay locked up.

Companies with drugs that might work together rarely test them because the legal negotiation takes longer than the trial. A pre-written standard contract would fix that.

Getting a cell line, mouse model or antibody from another lab can take six months of paperwork. Funders would require a standard agreement that goes through automatically unless someone objects within thirty days.

Companies say competition law stops them coordinating on combination trials and sharing failure data. A clear legal safe harbour for defined pro-patient collaborations would remove that excuse.

Companies would put their cancer drugs into a shared licensing pool so that any qualified investigator can test combinations of drugs from different owners under one standard agreement, with royalties split by a fixed formula.

Cancer's most important drivers, such as MYC and mutant p53, cannot be blocked with normal drugs. Pool effort and share results openly to build molecules that destroy them instead.

Academic labs find new tumour targets but cannot turn an antibody into an antibody-drug conjugate or a bispecific without licensed linker and payload technology. A shared platform would provide that at no cost for first trials.

Companies and public funders would pool money and scientists to crack the hardest cancer proteins, such as MYC and mutant p53, sharing everything openly until there is a real drug candidate, then competing on the final product.

When a company stops developing a cancer drug for business rather than safety reasons and leaves it idle for two years, it would be obliged to offer the rights, data package and remaining drug supply to qualified non-profit or academic developers on pre-set terms, keeping the right to resume. This turns the stalled-asset registry's listing into a duty.

Three companies testing three drugs against the same standard treatment each recruit their own control group. Pooling those controls in one shared study would need fewer patients and answer faster.

Journals and funders already ask trialists to share patient-level data; almost nobody checks. Make it a checked condition with real consequences.

Require that approved cancer drugs come with a standard set of data (blood levels, drug interactions, toxicity profile) so anyone can design a safe combination trial without asking the company.

Pay scientists a small bonus, added to their grant, when they post their results and data openly within six months of finishing an experiment, whether the result was positive or not.

Companies extend monopolies on cancer drugs with dozens of minor patents and deals that pay generic makers to stay out. Closing these loopholes would bring cheaper versions years earlier.

For cancers too rare or too poor to attract companies, run drug discovery in the open, the way neglected tropical diseases are tackled, and take candidates to first human trials with public money.

Patients would carry a digital consent that says how their trial samples and records may be reused, so their contribution is not locked to one company or study and they decide who benefits from it.

Scientists hide results for fear of being beaten to publication. If journals and funders guaranteed that a preprinted finding cannot be scooped, and encouraged rival groups to publish side by side, sharing would become safe.

Molecular glue degraders make one protein destroy another, but thalidomide analogues and indisulam were found by luck. A systematic screen of chemical libraries against genetically diverse cancer cell lines, published as an open atlas, would map which of the roughly 600 human E3 ligases can be redirected and against which targets.

When universities license cancer discoveries to companies, the contract would reward companies that price fairly and sell in poor countries, and penalise those that do not, using the royalty rate as the lever.

India's 2012 compulsory licence on sorafenib cut its price by about 97% and its 2019 cap on trade margins lowered the shelf price of 42 cancer drugs; voluntary licences through a patent pool would achieve the same without a fight.