Repurposing Drugs

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $12.7 million to nine academic research teams to work with pharmaceutical companies on new uses for abandoned drug candidates. The yearlong projects are the first to be funded under a program called Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules, which is being led by NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).

When NCATS first announced the program one year ago, eight pharmaceutical companies agreed to donate 58 investigational drugs. The compounds are safe, but they were not effective in treating a particular disease or were dropped for business reasons, says NCATS Director Christopher P. Austin.

NCATS received 160 preliminary applications from researchers with ideas about new therapeutic uses for the compounds. The nine projects selected involve seven of the 58 compounds. They cover eight disease areas.

Austin is excited about the program because it streamlines pharma-academia collaborations. By standardizing the agreements governing the collaborations, NCATS enables drug companies and academic researchers to move quickly to work together and exchange data.

“The NCATS team was crucial in bringing our group at Yale together with AstraZeneca,” says Stephen M. Strittmatter, a professor of neurosciences at Yale School of Medicine. His team will be testing whether a drug candidate developed to treat cancer can be used for Alzheimer’s disease.