Over the past year, the "digital" development model pioneered by NuMedii has begun to deliver, with a Phase IIa trial of a computationally found drug-disease match now underway. The next clinical candidates are in databases awaiting discovery, and this week NuMedii inked a deal to increase its chances of finding them.
The Stanford University spinout has partnered with Thomson Reuters to gain access to its MetaCore and Integrity content. By combining its Big Data technology with findings gathered by Thomson Reuters--which include biological, chemical and pharmacological information on more than 365,000 compounds--NuMedii believes it can find new uses for old drugs. The Thomson Reuters databases include information on the developmental status, patent protection and effects of bioactive compounds, each of which is a potential candidate for repurposing by NuMedii.
"Our collaboration with NuMedii is an opportunity to combine the leading information sources available with novel analytics, data integration and biomedical expertise in a way that has not been done before outside of a laboratory environment," Thomson Reuters Life Sciences SVP Joe Donahue said. NuMedii is underpinned by software that company founder Dr. Atul Butte created at Stanford to find novel drug-disease pairings in pharmacological, disease and clinical databases. A candidate found using this approach--desipramine, sold by Sanofi ($SNY) as an antidepressant--is now nearing proof-of-concept in a cancer trial.
NuMedii will follow the same model for any candidates that result from its work with Thomson Reuters. Having validated the drug in preclinical models, NuMedii will tweak the formulation and advance into the clinic. Success in proof-of-concept trials will lead to NuMedii trying to out-license the drug. Thomson Reuters will receive a cut of any revenue generated by products resulting from the collaboration.
- read the press release