Developing a drug to treat a new disease, moving the drug forward through clinical trials, and obtaining approval is a long, expensive process with a high risk of failure. An enticing alternative approach to finding a cure for a disease is drug repurposing, which reuses existing drugs, including some that failed in initial trials. Because most repurposed drugs have already passed the early phases of development and clinical testing, they get to market in 6.5 years and cost $300 million on average, less than half the time, and one-quarter of the cost needed to develop a new drug from scratch. While drug repurposing is not new, the speed at which it needs to be implemented during a pandemic is unprecedented. This is the principal open challenge that will be discussed in the workshop. This workshop will provide a forum for researchers who do active and state-of-the-art research in various aspects of drug repurposing. Participants will discuss ways to expedite drug repurposing by compressing years of work into months or even weeks through automation, data science and machine learning, novel data sources, and new biotechnology platforms. The workshop will facilitate community building by bringing together at least two distinct audiences: computational experts who develop algorithms and knowledge experts who use the algorithms as well as other tools for drug repurposing. The workshop results, including the website with linked resources, video recordings, and a perspective paper, will be disseminated broadly via public repositories. The perspective publication will be a roadmap intended for a broad audience with specific recommendations for rapid drug repurposing in future pandemics. Workshop speakers and panelists will be researchers with a wide variety of demographic backgrounds and experiences to promote diversity along several axes (gender, seniority, and affiliation).
Historically, successful drug repurposing is based on serendipitous and opportunistic discoveries. However, this approach is unable to produce science-based diagnostic tools at the pandemic scale. This major problem motivates the workshop, which will be held in 2020 as a virtual two-day symposium with open registration and several hundred attendees. The workshop participants will present progress, discuss the challenges of current repurposing research, and recommend innovative ways to address these challenges and realize the full potential of drug repurposing. The workshop will cover topics related to all steps of drug repurposing, including preclinical research, clinical research, regulatory review, and post-market and safety monitoring. Bearing in mind the opportunities and challenges identified at the workshop, the organizers will put forward recommendations on how to compress current repurposing timescales into much shorter ready-to-use solutions to fight emerging pathogens. The organizers anticipate presenting a framework, context, and ultimately guidelines for accelerating the use of data-driven solutions in drug repurposing for the benefit of patients in the US.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
