Charlottesville, VA, 12 February 2009
In recent years the life sciences community is seeing increasing evidence showing that drugs that have failed as a cure for one disease may hold promise for a different condition. An academic consortium led by UC Davis is now leading a collaborative effort, called the Pharmaceutical Assets Portal, to allow scientists to learn about existing drugs that could be used as cures for diseases and conditions other than the one they were originally intended to target, a process known as drug repositioning.
The CTSA Pharmaceutical Assets Portal aims to forge relationships with the pharmaceutical/biotech industry with the intent to facilitate the transfer of the investigational drugs and biologics for academic research. An important resource of the Portal is the Foci of Expertise tool which according to its creators “… allows exploration of targets and diseases and their associated expertise that are of high interest to CTSA. The tool will be used to create the cluster of the CTSA academic researchers studying a particular disease or gene/protein/pathway. Once identified, these cluster would be able not only to undertake joint academic research project but also to partner with the pharmaceutical industry on drug repositioning.”
Information about individual researchers at participating CTSA institutions will be added based on data extracted from Biovista’s database of researcher expertise and disease-target correlations.
For more information on the CTSA Pharmaceutical Assets Portal click here.