Repurposing And/or Reactivating Disused Clinically Relevant Medical Therapies

Since humans first discovered that plants and biological extracts could be used to treat ailments, many thousands of assorted therapies have been developed to treat illness and disease. In modern times these therapies include, but are not limited to, small molecule synthetic compounds, large biological proteins, and peptides. Developing new drugs and therapies is expensive, and takes a long time.

Decisions about which drugs should be developed for clinical use are often made based on market value and potential profit, as companies seek to recoup their investment.

Over time, a considerable number of these therapies have become disused. One reason for this is due to cellular resistance, that is, the biological system that a therapy targets evolves and becomes resistant to treatment. Increasing resistance to antimicrobials, antibiotics and anti-cancer drugs is predicted to cause a global health crisis, that will return us to a medical dark-age.

In 2010 the economic impact of cancer was found be $1.16 trillion (1.5% of GDP). Cancer is difficult to treat because normal healthy cells and cancerous tumour cells are similar. This, combined with increasing anti-cancer drug resistance and the high cost of effective treatments, means that global mortality figures are only set to rise from estimated deaths of 9.6 million in 2018.

The increasing prevalence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria has been well advertised, however what is not so widely known is that AMR has now been identified to every antimicrobial currently marketed. By 2050 it is estimated that 10 million people per year will die from AMR diseases.

I will address this global health crisis by working to reactivate drugs that have already been approved for use but have been discarded. I will produce a technology that will revitalise currently approved medical therapies by increasing their efficacy, while simultaneously developing novel drug candidates.

To achieve this, I have invented a novel class of molecules that can stick selectively to the surface of specific types of target cell (such as cancer or bacteria). This 'sticking' process produces molecular gateways into the target cell which either result in cell death or enable drugs to pass effectively from the outside to the inside of the cell, increasing permeability of a drug towards the target cell.

This type of work is interdisciplinary, and therefore requires a team that are able to work at the interface of chemistry, biology and pharmacy and social science.

Although currently targeted to produce novel therapeutic weapons in the fight against AMR and cancer, the development of this technology has the potential to regenerate and increase the activity for a much wider range of currently approved but disused medical therapies. It may also make drugs effective for treating a wider variety of diseases or infections where entry into the cell is the limiting factor, increasing the number and scope of illnesses that can be treated by the same drug.

Therefore, this molecular innovation represents an attractive alternative to the high costs and long-timeframes associated with the conventional identification and development of a single novel drug.