Second Chances: Repurposing Drugs For Type 2 Diabetes

By Erik Rocheford, study director in Discovery Research Services, Charles River

Look around. Think differently. What’s old may be new again.

Let’s call a spade a spade.  Drug discovery is difficult.  Joe Cornicelli’s blog that opened this series indicated as much and the facts do not lie either.  When looking at small biotech groups all the way up to Big Pharma, (and factoring in the costs for all those drug failures) it costs a company between $800 million and $12 billion and between nine and 14 years to discover one new molecular entity to treat a disease, a recent analysis in Forbes suggests.  The solution to this problem may be the word “new.”  Old trends in the world are coming back in full force.  Vinyl records—back.  Hipsters and ironic moustaches, a new version of Kerouac’s beatnik hippie movement—back.   It’s worth looking into the medicine cabinet as well for old therapeutics that may be rebranded for new treatments of type 2 diabetes (T2D).