«L’National Cancer Institute Pascale Foundationin addition to being a partner of the REMEDI4all project, thanks to a long commitment in the drug reuse approach in oncology, he was also selected to develop one of the four demonstration projects related to the feasibility of the platform – said Alfredo Budillon, principal researcher for Pascale and scientific director of the Institute – In particular, we proposed to evaluate, preclinically and in an international clinical study, a new therapeutic strategy based on the use of two repurposed drugs: the anticonvulsant agent valproic acid plus simvastatin, a of cholesterol, in association with conventional chemotherapy, as a first-line therapeutic approach for pancreatic cancer».
Il Mario Negri has a broad range of expertise across the drug development and repositioning value chain, from the discovery phase through to preclinical and clinical development.
“In REMEDI4ALL – explains Maddalena Fratelli, principal researcher for the” Mario Negri “and head of the Pharmacogenomics unit of the same institute – we will contribute to the development of the platform, in particular for artificial intelligence tools and for the creation of project development plans. We will also collaborate in the demonstration projects on pancreatic cancer of the Pascale Institute and on Covid-19 of the Swedish Karolinska Institute, with genomic, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies ».
«L’Rizzoli Orthopedic Institute, as a reference center for rare musculoskeletal pathologies at an Italian and international level, will develop a study on osteogenesis imperfecta, a disease that represents the most common hereditary cause of bone fragility for the treatment of which no drug currently has the authorization to ‘marketing – explains Luca Sangiorgi, principal researcher in Remedi4all for Rizzoli and director of the Structure of Rare Musculoskeletal Diseases of the Bolognese Institute. – The reuse project we will coordinate aims to demonstrate that there is a drug, losartan, that can be used as a safe and economical treatment for osteogenesis imperfecta through a new approach that has not yet been previously studied in a clinical setting. Like Rizzoli, we will coordinate the Italian study, in parallel with our British colleagues at Sheffield Children’s Hospital ».
Dompé Pharmaceuticals will make Exscalate availablethe most powerful drug design platform based on artificial intelligence and supercomputing which, thanks to its processing capacity of over 3 million molecules per second, is able to accelerate the identification of new indications for known compounds. Combining in silico drug design and a virtual library of 2 trillion molecules, the Exscalate team will apply the unique polypharmacology approach to identify the most promising molecules. Dompé Pharmaceuticals will also support the entire value chain for the development of pre-clinical and clinical candidates by systematizing its clinical and regulatory know-how.