Caption: The Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules pilot program matches researchers with pharmaceutical compounds to explore new treatments for patients
Developing a drug takes time and money: on the average, around 14 years and $2 billion or more. More than 95 percent of the drugs fail during development. Even those that go all the way to large and expensive clinical trials in humans frequently don’t make the cut—perhaps because they weren’t quite as effective as they were supposed to be, had undesirable side effects, or didn’t align with the developer’s business priorities. But some of these compounds may have surprising therapeutic properties that have not yet been fully exploited. It would be a wasted opportunity not to take another look at them and test them for effectiveness in other conditions.
For that reason, our National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), with financial support from the NIH Common Fund, launched a pilot program to discover new therapeutic uses for existing molecules. Today we are awarding $12.7 million to nine academic institutions to reexamine a collection of compounds developed by major pharmaceutical companies and test them as treatments for diseases, both common and rare: from alcoholism and Alzheimer’s disease to Duchenne muscular dystrophy and schizophrenia.
This new program is a collaboration between NIH, academia, and industry. Industry collaborators—AbbVie (formerly Abbott), AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Pharmaceutical Research & Development, L.L.C., Pfizer, and Sanofi—made 58 of their compounds, all extensively researched and tested for safety, available. Relevant data about these 58 molecules was shared with biomedical researchers and, as we had hoped, scientists from across the country recognized how these molecules might interact with various disease pathways or disorders they are studying. They submitted some remarkably innovative ideas; NIH carried out a rigorous review and is now distributing the first awards. With this approach, we are hopeful that we can give these compounds a second chance, while making important discoveries for several diseases.
I am very excited about this pilot program for several reasons. As part of the design of the program, NIH developed template agreements to streamline the legal and administrative process for academic-industry collaboration—and already it’s clear that that strategy is saving months if not years of negotiations. In addition, this is our first experiment with “crowdsourcing” of therapeutic opportunities—giving the entire biomedical community access to highly active compounds and related data, and enabling anyone to make new connections to disease. I expect this model to yield some great science, and I’m optimistic it will also speed the development of new drugs to patients.
Who knows what therapeutic talents these 58 molecules possess? These “Therapeutics Discovery” awards will help us find out.
References:
Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules
Library of Industry-Provided Agents
Therapeutic Development Process
NIH support: National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences; Common Fund