Failure museum
The field learns more from what did not work than from what did, but failures vanish from pipelines and press releases. This room keeps them: drugs stopped, targets abandoned, approvals withdrawn, each with the lesson it left. Nothing here is a verdict on the idea; several of these targets later worked with a different weapon.
Why failures are shown: they are how the field learns. Every drug that did not work sharpened the next one: a target that survived a bad molecule, a dose that was wrong, a trial design that misled. Several targets in this room later worked with a different weapon, and the lesson attached to each exhibit is what the successful drugs were built on. Nothing here is a statement about any patient's outlook; it is the field's record of what it tried, kept so it does not have to be learned twice.
Other setbacks
Negative or withdrawn items without a single dominant lesson.
Azedra was a radioactive drug that homed in on adrenal-type tumours (phaeochromocytoma and paraganglioma) that could not be removed and delivered radiation from inside. It was approved in 2018 and discontinued by its maker in 2024.
A cancer-targeting antibody carrying a radioactive form of iodine was used, as a single course, to treat a type of blood cancer called non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The manufacturer stopped selling it in 2014 because too few patients were using it.