Drug Repurposing

Drug repurposing – uncovering new uses for already-approved medicines that could benefit patients facing a different need than originally intended – is bringing hope to millions of the desperately ill and their families.

This is especially true for those suffering from rare diseases – who can’t wait a dozen or more years for a new treatment to be discovered, developed, and made available.

Drug repurposing not only offers advantages over traditional de novo drug development in terms of cost, speed to market and improved patient outcomes, it can provide unique investment opportunities. We invite you to learn more about drug repurposing on the pages that follow.

For the last several decades, growth in the pharmaceutical industry has been driven by a convergence of factors, most notably a
growing, aging population — as well as by advances in medical science and improvements in purchasing power and access to
quality healthcare and medicines to poor and middle-class families worldwide, all of which has greatly expanded demand.
The global pharmaceutical market in 2020 is expected to top $1.3 trillion in annual sales.

The pharmaceutical industry clearly plays an important role in discovering and developing medications and vaccines that are
helping to reduce the incidence of diseases, to cure diseases and to improve the quality of life for tens of millions of people
around the world.

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS
That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s a complex journey to find just one miracle cure – from that eureka moment of
discovery in the laboratory to routine use in patients – and can easily take a dozen or more years and cost well in excess of
$2 billion.

Moreover, this ignores the fact that along the way most drug candidates fall by the wayside, for any number of reasons, including
safety issues, failure to show efficacy, and lack of commercial promise – which can be seen in increased R&D spending and
decreased new drug output.