Here’s a little something to brighten up the start of the week…

It must feel like Christmas-come-early for one innovator in the field of improving access to medicine. Last month, Cures Within Reach (CWR) received a 500 K grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This money will go towards developing the world’s first open-participation research platform to explore whether drugs, devices and nutriceuticals approved for one or more human diseases can be repurposed to create “new” treatments for other diseases.

Remember how you felt that time you realized all those empty pasta sauce jars would make great storage containers for your seashell collection? Or when you that collection of wine bottle corks into a dartboard? This is sort of like that, just bigger!

Just like your new dartboard, repurposing medical technology saves time and money. “Rediscovery Research” finds new uses for medical technologies which have already been approved.  Most Rediscovery Research projects can move from testing to patients in as little as 18-36 months and for a research cost of less than $250,000, a fraction of the time and cost it takes to bring a brand new medicine to the market.

Consider that eight percent of the world’s population (over half a billion people) have a life-changing disease for which there is no universally effective therapy. Furthermore, there are fewer than 400 approved treatments for the more than 6800 rare diseases, affecting an estimated 25-30 million Americans.  The mainstream medical research industry can only create about 30 new drugs a year, and the cost of this work often means that the diseases which affect the largest number of people (and the wealthiest) tend to be the focus.

While the rest of the patients are waiting, there are thousands of familiar drugs and devices that have the potential to be repurposed to create new uses that can improve length and quality of life.  Because their model is non-profit and significantly more efficient that traditional biotechnology R&D, CWR is able to focus their efforts towards treatments for rare diseases, too often neglected by the bigger biotechnology companies

CWR is not exclusively focused on rare diseases. Many of their recent and current projects focus on newer, more affordable methods for early detection and treatment of many kinds of cancer, diabetes, and other, less common, genetic disorders.

This online platform that this grant is helping develop will scale up the open-science initiative that speeds the delivery of treatments and cures to patients.  This means more treatments for more patients at a lower cost for both patients and the healthcare system at large.

The following info-graphic helps visualize the many benefits of Rediscover Research compared to traditional Research and Development of new biotechnology. 

This is just the kind of innovation that gets the Access Our Medicine team out of bed on a Monday morning! 
We are looking forward to seeing the  innovations that help bring these life-changing technologies into the hands of the people that need them.
To read more, check out the press release here,  or visit CWR’s website.