Second act

Drug repurposing gets a boost as academic researchers join the search for novel uses of existing drugs. In February 2011, the British drug company AstraZeneca shelved its experimental drug zibotentan, intended for the treatment of nonmetastatic prostate cancer in men who do not respond to hormonal treatments. Despite early promise, the drug failed to improve patients’ survival in trials. But more than a year later, the drug might get a second wind, this time as a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, thanks to a partnership between industry and academia. With AstraZeneca crowdsourcing the search for potential new applications for its drugs in the academic community, the partnership could lead to treatments not apparent during the original development of the drug. Crowdsourcing innovation is a concept that has gained increasing favor in biological research, with notable examples such as Foldit (1), a popular computer game that harnesses human intuition to solve the baffling puzzle of how cellular proteins fold, and DIYBio (2), a movement launched by a team of amateur biologists who perform sophisticated research in garage labs. Public funding and crowdsourced innovation propel drug discovery. ©iStockphoto.com/adventtr. But there are few precedents for a systematic, large-scale crowdsourced approach to drug discovery adopted by the pharmaceutical industry, which is sometimes perceived as fiercely guarding its intellectual capital. The case of zibotentan is one example of an increasingly favored approach to drug discovery, one with the potential to save money, time, and lives. Because zibotentan, code-named AZD4054, blocks a human protein called the endothelin A receptor, implicated in narrowing blood vessels, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK neuropathologist Seth Love reasons that the drug might help restore normal blood flow in the brain of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, the progression of which has been tied to constricted blood vessels in the brain’s cortex (3 …