Crowdsourcing Tool to Find New Uses for Drugs
It is not unusual to see promising new drugs and therapeutics stall during the development stages. This is obviously an expensive and potentially financially crippling state of affairs as the costs associated with developing drugs are astronomical. If they don’t end up on pharmacy shelves that’s a lot of invested dollars that haven’t been realized.
But a new tool may be able to help pharma companies out of these difficulties, and it’s based on harnessing the wisdom of the crowd.
Transparency Life Sciences (TLS), bills itself as the world’s first drug development company based on open innovation, and this week it announced the launch of Indication Finder™ to identify promising new uses for existing drug candidates.
“At TLS we believe that open innovation principles and tools hold great promise for radically redesigning a drug development process that is slow, costly and unproductive,” commented Tomasz Sablinski, MD, PhD, co-founder and CEO of TLS.
The project will initially focus on 58 clinical stage compounds that were being developed by pharmaceutical companies, and are now currently included in the drug re-purposing program, Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules, sponsored by the U.S. National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), a division of the National Institutes of Health.
How it Works
Participants review the list of compounds and their background descriptions and then identify those they believe have the potential for further development. They must also explain the basis for their recommendations. These responses are then pulled together and presented back to the crowd for further analysis and discussion.
All of this will help TLS to decide which compounds to pursue further.
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