Status: Completed

Start Date: March 2012

End Date: February 2013

 

In this project, funded by the CFIDS Association of America, Biovista is using its proprietary COSS™ Drug Repurposing platform to identify non-obvious drug candidates to treat CFS.

 

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a complex syndrome characterized by intense fatigue not due to physical activity, with duration of at least six months and accompanied by a number of secondary symptoms including sore throat, memory and concentration impairments, headache, sleep disorders and, most often, muscle and joint pain. It is estimated that CFS may affect over one million Americans.

However, due to the complexity of the disease only a small percentage of them have received a diagnosis and an FDA-approved pharmacological therapy still does not exist. The disease is challenging because the etiology and pathophysiology are not well understood.

In this project Biovista utilizes Drug Repurposing (DR) in order to identify novel drug candidates for the treatment of CFS, focusing on CFS-related cognitive impairment (CFS-CI) and unrefreshing sleep (CFS-US), but also including all the other CFS symptoms.

In order to identify potential new drugs for the treatment of CFS, all drugs currently approved by the FDA will be examined for relevance to the CFS symptoms based on their own mechanism of action, or via an off-target effect, using the Biovista COSS™ drug repurposing platform.

In parallel, Biovista will examine these drugs in combinations to determine if they are more efficacious than the corresponding monotherapies. Repurposing candidates first identified will be further evaluated based on a number of criteria including their safety profiles in their original indications, their anticipated interactions with other drugs used in the treatment of CFS, their pharmacological characteristics and their relevance to the pathophysiology of CFS in general.


See a presentation of the Biovista-CFIDS project at the 2012 Partnering for Cures Innovator Presentations.

For more information

Find out how the CFIDS Research Institute Without Walls (RIWW) approach is linking R&D work under one roof and helping accelerate the development of treatment for this rare disease.