The NIH's Drug Repurposing Program Gets Going

Here's an update on the NIH's NCATS program to repurpose failed clinical candidates from the drug industry. I wrote about this effort here last year, and expressed some skepticism. It's not that I think that trying drugs (or near-drugs) for other purposes is a bad idea prima facie, because it isn't. I just wonder about the way the way the NIH is talking about this, versus its chances for success. As was pointed out last time this topic came up, the number of failed clinical candidates involved in this effort is dwarfed by the number of approved compounds that could also be repurposed - and have, in fact, been looked at for years for just that purpose. The success rate is not zero, but it has not been a four-lane shortcut to the promised land, either. And the money involved here ($12.7 million split between nine grants) is, as that Nature piece correctly says, "not much". Especially when you're going after something like Alzheimer's: Strittmatter’s team is one of nine that won funding last month from the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) in Bethesda, Maryland, to see whether abandoned drugs can be aimed at new targets. Strittmatter, a neuro­biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, hopes that a failed cancer drug called saracatinib can block an enzyme implicated in Alzheimer’s. . . . . .Saracatinib inhibits the Src family kinases (SFKs), enzymes that are commonly activated in cancer cells, and was first developed by Lond...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Clinical Trials Source Type: blogs