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.

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.