In her Boston Globe Op-Ed, Reboot Rx Founder and CEO Laura Kleiman discusses how generic drugs hold so much untapped potential to be repurposed for cancer and other diseases, yet this is not being realized because of the lack of market incentives and funding.

More investors than ever want their money to make a positive impact on the world while producing a financial return. Reboot Rx’s CEO Laura Kleiman recently moderated the “Investing for Social Impact” panel at the WuXi Global Forum. She shares reflections on how impact investing could fund clinical trials testing new uses for generic drugs.

We showed that our AI technology can quickly sift through massive amounts of data to find the most consequential evidence. We then deployed our technology to rigorously analyze 16,000 published studies and identify the most promising non-cancer generic drugs for the treatment of prostate cancer.

We received a $1.5 million donation, which enabled us to launch Reboot Rx and hit the ground running in 2020 towards our goal of saving the lives of cancer patients with existing non-cancer generic drugs. We built our evidence synthesis pipeline and a working prototype of our AI technology that efficiently prioritizes drug repurposing candidates at scale, and we completed a proof of concept of our technology.

Cancer patients who contract COVID-19 and their doctors need to quickly find information about potential treatments, but there’s so much data that it’s impossible to make sense of it all. We applied our AI technology to rapidly aggregate the most relevant studies on COVID-19 and cancer. Now that we’ve completed this proof-of-concept, we’re scaling this approach to synthesize the cancer data for all non-cancer generic drugs. This will enable us to find the most promising generics to repurpose for cancer.

In an effort to develop treatments for COVID-19 faster, drug developers have turned to repurposing existing drugs. Innovative approaches are being utilized to test these widely available drugs and other COVID-19 treatments in clinical trials more quickly and propel drug development forward at an unprecedented rate.

Drug repurposing delivers treatments to patients faster, making it an ideal strategy for combating public health crises like COVID-19 and cancer. Interestingly, nearly half of the repurposed generic drugs being tested for COVID-19 may also help treat cancer.

Repurposing of drugs that are safe, available, and inexpensive could immediately help cancer patients around the world live longer and better.

Cancer takes an enormous toll on our society, healthcare system, and economy.

A cancer diagnosis in the family of Harvard Biomedical Informatics grad Pradeep Mangalath led him to join Harvard Medical School as a Master's student and on to Reboot Rx thanks to a Harvard Data Science Public Service Fellowship.

We spoke with MassBio about our experience participating in the 2018 MassBio Life Sciences and Healthcare Nonprofit Pitch Challenge and all we have achieved since then.

We have partnered with computer scientists at IBM Research’s Science for Social Good Initiative and Byron Wallace’s group at Northeastern University to build our evidence synthesis technology. Together we are using AI and machine learning to identify and synthesize data on non-cancer generic drugs being tested as cancer treatments.

Innovative funding models and economic incentives are needed to enable clinical testing of repurposed generic drugs. We spoke with Dr. Rick Thompson, CEO of Findacure, about his experience with the drug repurposing social impact bond in the UK.