Developing diagnostics and treatments
At the Broad Institute, researchers are revealing deep biological insights about the causes of disease, which are leading to new ways to monitor, diagnose, and treat patients with greater precision. These include new tools that help predict diseases well before symptoms appear, and more effective therapeutics that reduce the chance of relapse or drug resistance. Learn more about #HowWeScience.
Drug Repurposing Hub
Finding new opportunities for old drugs to treat common diseases
New drugs can take more than a decade to get to market. But what if we could take thousands of drugs already approved to safely treat disease, as well as other compounds that have been studied as potential drugs, and find new uses for these old medicines? That is the mission of the Broad Institute’s Drug Repurposing Hub, an open-access repository of more than 6,000 compounds, many of which have been FDA approved. Researchers at the Hub have spent years curating and verifying these compounds, and are now testing them against disease cell lines, looking for that serendipitous “hit” that no one could have predicted. They are also using this resource to glean new insights into the characteristics of disease — efforts that can also jumpstart new drug discovery programs.
