AI can find new indications for existing drugs

Existing pharmaceutical drugs, that have safely passed clinical trials, could have unimagined therapeutic uses. A drug that works in one disease indication might also work in another. But uncovering which other diseases a drug could also help with is a challenge. That’s where AI comes in.

Owkin’s DrugMATCH is our AI-powered drug positioning engine. DrugMATCH analyzes multimodal patient data and uses knowledge graphs, with advanced machine learning, to identify novel disease indications and patient subgroups that could benefit from existing drugs. An example is our recent TEAD paper which identified new cancer types that could be therapeutic targets for drugs affecting YAP1-TEAD.

This approach can dramatically reduce the time and cost typically associated with drug development, as drugs have already gone through phase 1 clinical trials for safety and need only be tested in phase 2 trials on the new indications, suggested by DrugMATCH.