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There are over 10,000 rare diseases — 95% of which don’t have a cure. It can cost billions of dollars and take more than a decade to develop a new treatment. Because patient populations in the rare disease space can sometimes only consist of a few thousand — or even a few dozen people — drug companies have been hesitant to invest that kind of time and capital developing a drug that’s unlikely to turn a profit.
Drug repurposing flips that model on its head. Repurposing looks for new ways to use existing drugs to treat diseases that they weren’t originally designed for. And now there are groups that are using AI to make that process more efficient.
When Dr. David Fajgenbaum and his colleagues were looking to launch Every Cure, a non-profit focused on drug repurposing, they had a big decision to make.
“If you want to repurpose drugs, there are two ways you can go. One is you can say, we are going to open up our shop and let patients and disease groups come to us and say, ‘Hey, will you find a drug for my disease?’” Fajgenbaum said. “Or you take another approach ... using AI to find basically the lowest-hanging fruit across all drugs and all diseases.”
