REMEDi4ALL, an ambitious EU-funded research initiative, launches to drive forward the repurposing of medicines in Europe
FIMM researchers contribute to the REMEDi4ALL project that kicks off with the ambition of establishing a European research and innovation eco-system that facilitates fast and cost-effective patient-centric development and access to repurposed medicines. The project involves 24 European organisations.
REMEDi4ALL project has launched today with the aim of making a major leap forward in drug repurposing. This promising approach to drug development, consisting in the identification, testing, and validation of new therapeutic indications for existing medications, is still a developing field that faces numerous regulatory barriers and systemic inefficiencies.
Since REMEDi4ALL focuses on already approved, discontinued, shelved or investigational therapeutics, its potential to significantly bring down times and costs of drug development makes this novel strategy attractive for rare and neglected conditions, cancer, emerging public health threats such as COVID-19 or new drug combinations. It also translates into more sustainable health systems.
EATRIS, the European infrastructure for translational medicine, will lead this multidisciplinary consortium involving 24 European organisations with the common goal of making cost-effective repurposed medicines more widely available. The project will receive 23M euros from Horizon Europe over the next 5 years.
FIMM researchers contribute to REMEDi4ALL by leading the in-silico drug repurposing Work Package. Scientists from Tero Aittokallio’s group and FIMM’s High Throughput Biomedicine core unit will work together to provide a sustainable catalogue of open-source AI tools and open-access datasets for supporting user-driven in silico discovery and repurposing applications. In particular, the team will develop and experimentally test computational approaches to drug-target mapping, prediction of drug combinations fighting cancers and COVID-19, as well as implement web-based portals that support drug repurposing and drug screening data analytics.
“This integrated platform will also provide the researches with a more direct means to further develop their drug repurposing leads, and to get support from the European-level collaboration network covering various expertise”, saysTero Aittokallio, the FIMM-PI in the project.
Read more about the project from this press release or visit the projects website.