The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Aims to Develop Drugs That Big Pharma Discarded

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This morning, the National Institutes of Health awarded $12.7 million to nine academic groups to test potential medicines for diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and schizophrenia that drug companies had abandoned because they were viewed as too risky or not lucrative enough. More than 95% of medicines that begin human testing do not reach the market. The reason might be because they are ineffective, because they are unsafe, or because a drug company stopped developing them for business reasons. But researchers have long wondered if some of these potential medicines, abandoned in one disease, might prove useful in another. There is precedent for the idea.

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