Cure for Needy: bringing down the production costs of orphan drugs
The Cure for Needy project believes that a global pool of information can help chemists and pharmaceutical manufacturers to bring down the production costs of orphaned drugs. Thomson Reuters has added its support to the project by providing access to some selected routes of synthesis in Prous Science Integrity®.
Most of us are lucky. We know that if we fall ill with a disease for which there is a proven cure, that drug will be available to us. But what if no manufacturer produces it? Where could we turn?
The Cure for Needy project, founded by James Tour, Chao Professor of Chemistry at Rice University, Houston, aims to help bring medications for these orphaned diseases to those who need them by looking for ways in which essential drugs can be made more cheaply.
According to Tour, there are many ways to synthesize a given drug, and the paths that exist aren’t necessarily the most efficient ones. By exploring other routes of synthesis, he believes these orphan drugs can become profitable, and hence brought back into mainstream care. Cure for Needy hopes to inspire a global network of chemists to seek out these more efficient, cheaper or greener ways to make the drugs, and pharmaceutical companies to use them to bring the drugs out of the cold.
The project believes that this can be achieved purely through altruistic means. The new routes of synthesis will be released to public domain, and pharmaceutical companies will manufacture the drugs for the recognition doing so would bring them. Smaller manufacturers might even use this to make a name for themselves.
Where the drug is held under patent, Cure for Needy will act as a conduit to help the potential manufacturer obtain permission to make it.
Thomson Reuters has jumped behind the Cure for Needy project by providing it with relevant synthesis schemes from its integrated drug discovery and development portal Prous Science Integrity.
"We are pleased to support the work of the Cure for Needy initiative," said Dr Josep Prous, jr, Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Healthcare & Science business of Thomson Reuters. "The provision of a central repository for orphan drugs synthesis schemes will drive forward innovation in an essential but under-represented area of research and development."
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