Philly nonprofit gets $48 million to use AI to find new uses for approved drugs

Every Cure, a Philadelphia-based disease research nonprofit, has received a $48.3 million federal contract to develop an artificial intelligence-powered matchmaking program to help doctors find new uses for already approved medications.

Algorithms will scan tens of thousands of approved medications and rare diseases to find potential matches. The approach would automate and expedite a process that is currently done on a case-by-case basis, when a medical team needs to find a new treatment for a patient’s rare disease.

The three-year contract was awarded by Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a research funding agency created within the National Institutes of Health in 2022 with the goal of expediting breakthrough medical treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases.

“Rather than the current, one-step-at-a-time drug discovery process, we have an opportunity to use artificial intelligence to rapidly understand how already approved drugs could be effective against other diseases,” said Renee Wegrzyn, the agency’s director, in a statement.

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Every Cure was co-founded by David Fajgenbaum, an immunologist and associate professor at University of Pennsylvania, after his experience being treated for Castleman Disease as a third-year medical student at Penn.

Castleman disease is a rare lymph node disorder that affects the immune system. Treatment options are limited and include chemotherapy. Fajgenbaum helped his team of doctors discover that his form of Castleman disease could be treated with a medication designed to prevent the body from rejecting donated organs.

“I’m alive because of a drug that wasn’t made for my disease,” Fajgenbaum said in an interview. “How many more cures are just sitting on a pharmacy shelf that we don’t even know are out there?”

The federal contract will help the organization scale up its operations by developing an open-source database for drug repurposing and establishing a portal for medical experts and patients to submit ideas.

Every Cure will use its AI platform to create “predictive efficacy scores” — a rating system of sorts that would score drugs for their potential to be repurposed to treat other diseases.

The nonprofit will use those scores to determine which drug and disease matches have the greatest potential, and recommend that they be considered for clinical trials to test new uses.