Workshop on Drug Repurposing for Future Pandemics

开发一种治疗新疾病的药物，通过临床试验推进药物，并获得批准是一个漫长而昂贵的过程，失败的风险很高。寻找治愈疾病的另一种诱人的方法是药物再利用，即重复使用现有药物，包括一些在最初试验中失败的药物。由于大多数重新利用的药物已经通过了早期的开发和临床测试，它们在6.5年内进入市场，平均花费3亿美元，不到从头开始开发新药所需时间的一半，成本的四分之一。虽然药物再利用并不是什么新鲜事，但在大流行期间需要以前所未有的速度实施。这是将在研讨会上讨论的主要开放性挑战。本次研讨会将为在药物再利用的各个方面进行积极和最先进研究的研究人员提供一个论坛。与会者将讨论如何通过自动化、数据科学和机器学习、新的数据源和新的生物技术平台，将多年的工作压缩到几个月甚至几周内，从而加快药物再利用。该研讨会将通过汇集至少两个不同的受众来促进社区建设：开发算法的计算专家和使用算法以及其他药物再利用工具的知识专家。讲习班的成果，包括链接资源的网站、录像和一份展望文件，将通过公共资料库广泛传播。该前瞻性出版物将是一个路线图，旨在为广大受众提供在未来流行病中快速药物再利用的具体建议。研讨会发言人和小组成员将是具有各种人口背景和经验的研究人员，以促进沿着几个轴（性别，资历和从属关系）的多样性。从历史上看，成功的药物再利用是基于偶然和机会主义的发现。然而，这种方法无法产生大流行规模的科学诊断工具。这一重大问题激发了研讨会，研讨会将于2020年举行，为期两天的虚拟研讨会，开放注册，数百名与会者。研讨会的参与者将介绍进展情况，讨论当前再利用研究的挑战，并建议创新方法来应对这些挑战，实现药物再利用的全部潜力。研讨会将涵盖与药物再利用的所有步骤相关的主题，包括临床前研究，临床研究，监管审查以及上市后和安全性监测。考虑到研讨会上确定的机遇和挑战，组织者将提出建议，说明如何将目前的再利用时间表压缩为更短的即用型解决方案，以对抗新出现的病原体。组织者预计将提出一个框架，背景，并最终指导方针，以加速使用数据驱动的解决方案在药物再利用，为患者的利益在美国。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。

Developing a drug to treat a new disease, moving the drug forward through clinical trials, and obtaining approval is a long, expensive process with a high risk of failure. An enticing alternative approach to finding a cure for a disease is drug repurposing, which reuses existing drugs, including some that failed in initial trials. Because most repurposed drugs have already passed the early phases of development and clinical testing, they get to market in 6.5 years and cost $300 million on average, less than half the time, and one-quarter of the cost needed to develop a new drug from scratch. While drug repurposing is not new, the speed at which it needs to be implemented during a pandemic is unprecedented. This is the principal open challenge that will be discussed in the workshop. This workshop will provide a forum for researchers who do active and state-of-the-art research in various aspects of drug repurposing. Participants will discuss ways to expedite drug repurposing by compressing years of work into months or even weeks through automation, data science and machine learning, novel data sources, and new biotechnology platforms. The workshop will facilitate community building by bringing together at least two distinct audiences: computational experts who develop algorithms and knowledge experts who use the algorithms as well as other tools for drug repurposing. The workshop results, including the website with linked resources, video recordings, and a perspective paper, will be disseminated broadly via public repositories. The perspective publication will be a roadmap intended for a broad audience with specific recommendations for rapid drug repurposing in future pandemics. Workshop speakers and panelists will be researchers with a wide variety of demographic backgrounds and experiences to promote diversity along several axes (gender, seniority, and affiliation).Historically, successful drug repurposing is based on serendipitous and opportunistic discoveries. However, this approach is unable to produce science-based diagnostic tools at the pandemic scale. This major problem motivates the workshop, which will be held in 2020 as a virtual two-day symposium with open registration and several hundred attendees. The workshop participants will present progress, discuss the challenges of current repurposing research, and recommend innovative ways to address these challenges and realize the full potential of drug repurposing. The workshop will cover topics related to all steps of drug repurposing, including preclinical research, clinical research, regulatory review, and post-market and safety monitoring. Bearing in mind the opportunities and challenges identified at the workshop, the organizers will put forward recommendations on how to compress current repurposing timescales into much shorter ready-to-use solutions to fight emerging pathogens. The organizers anticipate presenting a framework, context, and ultimately guidelines for accelerating the use of data-driven solutions in drug repurposing for the benefit of patients in the US.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.