NIH researchers create comprehensive collection of approved drugs to identify new therapies

                                                                                                   http://www.ncgc.nih.gov/

From the 27 April 2011 Eureka News Alert

Researchers have begun screening the first definitive collection of thousands of approved drugs for clinical use against rare and neglected diseases. They are hunting for additional uses of the drugs hoping to find off-label therapies, for some of the 6,000 rare diseases that afflict 25 million Americans. The effort is coordinated by the National Institutes of Health’s Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC).

“This is a critical step to explore the full potential of these drugs for new applications,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “The hope is that this process may identify some potential new treatments for rare and neglected diseases.”

The researchers assembled the collection of approved drugs for screening based on information from the NCGC Pharmaceutical Collection browser at http://tripod.nih.gov/npc. This publicly available, Web-based application described in a paper appearing in the April 27 issue of Science Translational Medicine, provides complete information on the nearly 27,000 active pharmaceutical ingredients including 2,750 small molecule drugs that have been approved by regulatory agencies from the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan, as well as all compounds that have been registered for human clinical trials……

Related Rare Diseases Resources

• National Organization for Rare Disorders
• Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center(Office of Rare Diseases, National Human Genome Research Institute)
• Office of Rare Diseases
• Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network(Office of Rare Diseases, National Center for Research Resources)
• Rare Diseases (MedlinePlus)

Related Articles

• Push to spur more drugs for deadly rare diseases (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• U.S. Rolls the Dice on Pharmaceutical Drug Innovation (livescience.com)
• Guidelines on rare diseases: Methods on handling evidence neither identified nor required

  Manuals and methods papers provide only isolated references; different requirements than those for more common diseases do not seem meaningful