We put the ReFRAME drug collection
together to basically be able to take
all of the molecules that have been
dosed safely in humans and make them
available for screening to  variety of
different collaborators both within the
Scripps Research environment, both in
Florida, here in La Jolla, but also
broadly across the whole world to be
tested on a variety of different assays
particularly those of neglected tropical
diseases and infectious diseases.
It's 14,000 compounds and we're actually
adding compounds every day to this
collection of which nearly 7,000 of
those molecules are ones that we
actually synthesized ourselves and put
into the collection to make available
for folks to screen.
We actually sent off our first compound
collection to a coronavirus
collaborating lab on the 24th of January.
We're actually just starting to get
screening data from those collections
and following up on confirming those
hits moving potentially some of them
into animal models of disease that give
us a better sense of could these be
potentially useful in humans. And, then in
parallel also working to figure
out ways, if those compounds are
promising, to move them quickly into
clinical trials with material that we can use.
A lot of drugs have actually
been discovered by this idea of
repurposing. As a matter of fact the use
of AZT during another large viral
outbreak that happened 30-40 years ago in HIV was actually discovered from
screening cancer drugs that the NIH had
at that time. And there are many, many
examples since then not just in viral
diseases but in other indications. So, we
see great purpose in taking drugs that
we already know a lot about. We know
about their safety. We know about how
well they work on certain things, how
well they may be tolerated in humans, how to synthesize them and manufacture them
on scale. We know all of those elements
so the ability to go from a very early
discovery to actually impacting patients is
much shorter using the drug repurposing
approach.
So one of the really key aspects about
Scripps Research is that we can go from
early biology of understanding the virus,
understanding the epidemiology of that
virus at Scripps Research working
closely with folks at Calibr like
myself and others really involved in
kind of drug development and how can we
take hits and quickly move them forward
into clinical development. The
ecosystem of Scripps Research is
exceptionally exciting to be able to
take something that's obviously of great
public health importance and be able to
have an impact in patients.
