Scientists working at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard are trying to build a collection of every drug ever developed. They are planning on using the collection to re-purpose existing drugs to treat diseases other than the ones they were created for, and hope to find treatments for rare diseases that currently have few, or no, available treatment options. You can read the full story here, at the Boston Globe.
The Broad Institute is a non-profit biomedical organisation. So far, they have collected around 4,700 compounds. In order to get all the drugs that have been developed since the end of the 19thcentury, the institute would need to collect approximately 5,000 or 6,000 more compounds. Drug regulators have not approved all of them; about half of the current collection is approved for patient use, and the other half is not. In most cases, the drugs were discontinued because they were ineffective or had significant side effects. Most of the drugs were originally intended to be used on neurological, cardiological, and infectious diseases.
It has taken over one million dollars and two years to reach this point, but now researchers are able to use the collection. The process of its creation was labour-intensive. A list of drugs that had been developed needed to be created through researching databases, and then the medicines had to be sourced and purchased. Scientists then analysed samples to ensure the drug was not contaminated, and they also created an online index that recorded summaries of all the acquired drugs, so that the information was easily accessible.
The next step will be to begin testing the drugs on various diseases to see which ones each drug could be a useful treatment for. There are many existing examples of drugs that have been repurposed; one of the most famous examples is Viagra, which was originally intended to be a blood pressure drug before it was used to treat impotence. Since then, it has had been suggested as a treatment for several other diseases, including malaria, mountain sickness, and heart disease.
It is becoming increasingly common to re-purpose drugs; it can save time, energy, and money to test old drugs on new diseases rather than develop new drugs, and this means that re-purposed drugs often become available relatively quickly. It can also be used to find new treatments for rare diseases that often lack funding. It tends to be faster for an existing and approved drug, which has known side-effects, to gain approval for the treatment of a different disease than it is for a new drug with less known side-effects to achieve regulatory approval.
Dr Todd Golub, the chief scientific officer at Broad Insitute, says, “If there’s something there that already exists that could benefit patients, then we have the obligation to make sure we find it as quickly as possible.”
