In a major boost for medical innovation, Every Cure, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, has bagged a $48.3 million government contract to advance the future of drug development. The grant, endowed through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), will fund the nonprofit's artificial intelligence-driven platform known as MATRIX, poised to revolutionize how existing drugs are repurposed for treating a broad array of diseases.
As reported by Philadelphia Business Journal, Dr. David Fajgenbaum, the associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who co-founded Every Cure, announced the federal funding at a recent White House event. With a personal battle against a rare condition, Castleman disease, Fajgenbaum took rein of his fate when traditional medicine offered little hope.
Fajgenbaum's experience with repurposed medicine is not just life-changing but potentially paradigm-shifting. Discovering that a drug used for transplant patients to prevent organ rejection could treat his life-threatening condition, he has since made it his mission to identify repurposing opportunities that could help others. This endeavor, which has already outlined promising leads for treatments of disorders such as sickle cell disease and ALS, aims at revolutionizing the way we approach drug development.
The organization’s plans, which include launching an open-source repurposing database and a portal for contributions from physicians and patients, were made possible by the substantial investment from ARPA-H. "I’m alive and in remission from my rare disease thanks to a repurposed drug that I discovered," Fajgenbaum told PR Newswire. “Through Every Cure, we are working tirelessly to unlock the full potential of FDA-approved drugs to treat many more diseases."
Every Cure not only benefits from governmental support but also attracts philanthropic interest. With past funding coming in from prominent names like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Lyda Hill Philanthropies, the injection of funds from ARPA-H stands to propel their mission further. The MATRIX platform, designed to generate predictive efficacy scores for over 3,000 FDA-approved drugs, is at the heart of Every Cure's strategy to combat 12,000 diseases, as detailed on 6abc.com.
With the intersection of AI and drug repurposing, Every Cure embodies the next front in battling diseases that have thus far eluded traditional research. The federal funding reaffirms the Biden administration's commitment to supporting high-impact health research, creating a beacon of hope for millions of patients worldwide waiting for cure breakthroughs.
