Hey pharmtender!

The NY Times piece "Old Drugs In, New Ones Out" is about an interesting development in drug R&D: combining old drugs that are off-patent and using this new product to treat a disease not treated by the original two.

There seem to be 3 reasons behind this new type of drug development: it's tough to discover new drugs that do work and are also safe, many drugs are coming 'off-patent', and information technology advancements have made it possible to try "several thousand [combinations] of medicines a day" affordably.

One of the companies profiled is CombinatoRx:

At its laboratory here, researchers and robots systematically pair about 2,000 generic drugs with one another, with 2 million different combinations possible. Each is tested on human cells. If a drug pair inhibits the cells’ production of inflammatory proteins, for example, that might be reason to explore whether the combination might work against arthritis.

Mr. Borisy describes it as a “dumb, brute-force, empirical approach” that assumes current knowledge of disease is too limited to predict in advance what combinations might work. The company does, though, give priority to testing pairs it believes have the best chance of working.

Eight of the company’s randomly arranged marriages, including drugs for cancer, arthritis and diabetes, have moved into clinical trials — an unusually high number for a company that is only seven years old. Other companies are taking more calculated approaches. Orexigen, in creating its obesity drug Contrave, took a treatment used for drug and alcohol addiction and combined it with an antidepressant sometimes used to help people quit smoking.