Group Aims to Accelerate Repurposing of Drugs to Treat Rare Diseases

The high cost and long time it takes to develop drugs has people looking for alternative strategies for finding new treatments. One such approach is repurposing—finding new uses for already approved drugs. This is particularly compelling for rare diseases where small patient populations can serve as a disincentive to drug developers and the need for therapeutics is largely unmet. We spoke to Bruce Bloom, president and chief science officer of Cures within Reach, which launched the crowdsourcing platform CureAccelerator to fund repurposing research for rare diseases. Bloom discussed the benefits of repurposing, how the CureAccelerator will work, and why he believes the initiative could help to build a new approach to repurposing research and developing treatments for rare disease.