REPO4EU News - Jan 2024

REPO4EU News – December 2024 Dear colleague, 2024 is officially here and this third newsletter introduces you to our extended globalization efforts –including national dissemination events in South East Asia and Oceania– and the reasoning behind why we consider this essential to make drug repurposing a reality, i.e., reaching patients. Read on to unveil some of REPO4EU’s recent highlights and achievements: below you can learn all about our truly innovative ethics-by-design approach, explore our brand new platform resources for bioinformatics and clinical trials, discover the latest additions to our growing community of global stakeholders… and much more! Prof, Harald Schmidt MD, PhD, PharmD Coordinator of REPO4EU – Maastricht University REPO4EU will be touring Southeast Asia and Oceania with two National Dissemination Events being hosted in Singapore (29 January) and Melbourne (1 February). These events are free and hybrid, with options to join in-person or online, and they will offer an insight into the latest research and advancements in drug repurposing through short talks given by experts in the field. These sessions offer a great opportunity to network, explore potential collaborations and meet peers in those regions. REPO4EU would also like to invite people based in neighbouring countries to attend, including New Zealand, Japan, India, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan. Help us spread the word and share the registration links with your colleagues: Singapore | Melbourne. Take a look and register now Take a look and register now REPO4EU On Tour - Upcoming events Leading the way on data resources and bioinformatics for drug repurposing A pipeline for drug candidates Introducing Drugst.One Development efforts for an initial pipeline to obtain drug candidates for a given target disease are now complete, and we have managed to also provide the underlying explanation –in the form of a metapath– that supports the outcome prediction. Drugst.One is a pioneering platform crafted to support drug repurposing using computational systems and network medicine. This platform transforms basic lists of proteins or genes into detailed, information-rich, integrated network representations. Last November, version 0.8 of the RepoScope drug repurposing database was released. This latest iteration contains enough nodes –707 compounds, 396 conditions, 269 targets– to start integration into the REPO4EU Platform. RepoScope latest release To arrive at this final prediction, both the NeDreX graph structure and available node descriptions are used to train a Graph Neural Network (GNN). Drug SMILE information is also considered in this process. Metapaths are then produced by identifying the simplest, most relevant path connecting the disease and the drug, according to the GNN. It features a fully functional interactive network explorer that can be effortlessly integrated into any command line or web application with minimal coding required. Moreover, Drugst.One continually updates its data warehouse and incorporates advanced algorithms for predicting drug repurposing candidates. Drugst.One aims to streamline drug discovery and pharmaceutical research by simplifying complex systems biology tools and making their results more actionable and directly linked to drug development. Exciting opportunities ahead for LLMs in drug repurposing and discovery In 2023, our partner Silo AI, together with the TurkuNLP research group from the University of Turku, launched an initiative to build a family of open, multilingual LLMs to cover all official EU languages. Through a partnership with LAION, vision capabilities have been added, making the models multimodal in addition to multilingual. The aim of the model family, named Poro, is to strengthen EU digital sovereignty. With fine-tuning, these models can be used for language processing, literature reviews and text analysis of, for example, medical reports that are to be used for drug development, drug discovery and drug repurposing. A Phase I/II clinical trial center network has been set up and the full registry of clinical sites is currently being processed for future integration into REPO4EU’s online platform. The goal is to provide researchers with a list of relevant organizations specialized in executing early phase trials with repurposed drugs. In parallel, big steps have been made in the preparation of a 2D-printed formulation for a pilot repurposed drug trial. Our ambition here is to allow researchers to print trial samples on demand in the clinically necessary doses, and in a flexible and placebo-controlled manner. Additionally, work is now underway to convert textual clinical trial and biometrics compendia into an online, engaging and easy-to-use web application to guide academic researchers through the highly regulated clinical trial environment and provide advice on innovative approaches for early phase trials with repurposed drugs. An overview of our innovative clinical trial resources Community updates and global reach-outs The REPO4EU community is growing! Latest collaboration highlights include the US Critical Path’s Institute Cure Drug Repurposing Collaboratory –a public-private partnership to advance drug repurposing, especially in areas of high unmet medical need–, and the NHS England Drug Repurposing program –providing tailored support to repurposed drugs in England by bringing together the national agencies responsible for researching, licensing, and assessing medicines. On top of these exciting partnerships, REPO4EU is also a founding member of the Medicines Repurposing International Network (MeRIT), which supports collaboration and communication between publiclyfunded drug repurposing initiatives. 14 organizations have joined the network so far, spanning 8 countries plus the European Union. Check out our community Check out our community At REPO4EU, we are fully aligned with the ethics and privacy-by-design approach. This has enhanced the ethical and legal robustness of our project and fostered a culture of ethical and privacy awareness and responsibility within the consortium. Ethics and privacy-by-design are not just theoretical concepts for the whole team but practical guides that shape their research practices and decisions. This alignment underscores the team’s dedication to conducting research that respects the rights and interests of all stakeholders –especially those of research subjectsand contributes positively to society. It’s a testament to the team’s commitment to "not just doing things right but also doing the right things". Ethics and privacy-by-design - why these are no buzzwords in REPO4EU REPO4EU at the INNO Steering Meeting in Sweden Learn more Learn more © REPO4EU 2024 REPO4EU was invited to the INNO steering meeting hosted by the Swedish Medical Products Agency, which took place last November 6-8 in Sigtuna, Sweden. The meeting is held annually, and regulators from different European groups (SAWP, EU-IN, CTFG and EUnetHTA) get together to share information and explore collaboration opportunities. Our presentation on REPO4EU's drug repurposing platform was well-received and sparked interest from the audience, reflecting the need for unlocking innovative approaches to repurposing.