Open Platform for European Networking and Repurposing of Oncological Assets and Drugs

Despite technological advances, the productivity of the pharma industry and the efficacy of cancer drugs appear to be declining, requiring time and cost unsustainable in the long term. The repurposing of drugs (DR) already on the market or in late clinical stages is an increasingly promising strategy for developing novel therapies, especially cancer treatment. Serendipitous DR has recently been used in the early stages of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic by front line health practitioners who were under pressure to find novel therapies fast as they attempted to save patients and help relieve the considerable stress on national healthcare systems. But serendipitous DR is not very efficient and in the case of cancer field-testing a very large number of possible drugs is not a feasible strategy. The aim of the NEWROAD project is to develop an EU-wide capability for Systematic Drug Repurposing (SDR), meaning the ability to identify with a high degree of predictive accuracy novel therapies for any disease of interest and at a future stage any combination of diseases. To achieve this NEWROAD will develop an open, collaborative in silico platform for the repurposing of drugs in oncology based on Augmented Intelligence (AuI) architecture layered on top of Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, initially targeted at rare and paediatric cancer research. The platform is designed with easy-to-use yet powerful AI features that aim to encourage researcher engagement and collaboration. NEWROAD will be deployable on a network of high-performance computers and in the cloud, and will leverage data provided by hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical companies etc. in the European Community. The NEWROAD platform will therefore have a triple function: 1. The development of novel therapies based on the repurposing of drugs (initial focus on oncology); 2. the sharing of clinical data by entities in the European Community; 3. the development of an open collaborative platform for SDR.