REPO4EU News - Sep 2023

NEWSLETTER NO. 2 –SEPTEMBER 2023 Dear colleague, One year of REPO4EU! Thank you for your continuous support and interest. I would like to take this opportunity to update you on our latest achievements and provide some more details on exciting new things on the horizon. Together, we want to make a profound change to medicine and patient benefit. Read on to find out how. Prof, Harald Schmidt MD, PhD, PharmD Coordinator of REPO4EU – Maastricht University Last year's RExPO22 -our interdisciplinary drug repurposing conference in Maastricht spanning bioinformatics, diagnostics and innovative clinical trials, patenting, regulatory and business developmentwas a major success and built a strong European community. One year later, RExPO is now moving to Sweden and going global. Co-chaired by Harald Schmidt and Paolo Parini, the conference will host global players in drug repurposing from the Americas, Asia and Australia. We are looking forward to seeing you at RExPO23 in Stockholm - click below for all the details on the agenda, registration, abstract submission, trip logistics... and more! It is RExPO time again – what are you waiting for? THIS IS RExPO23THIS IS RExPO23 Join our drug repurposing community REPO4EU On Tour, our ongoing series of national events with community gettogethers in Spain, Portugal, Greece and Germany so far, is living proof of our unwavering commitment to dig deep into each country's drug repurposing scene, and liaise with key actors, such as the RepOG regulator group. As a result, we have onboarded several new members to our REPO4EU community and advisory boards for expert insights and matchmaking. Sounds interesting? You are welcome to join us - check out our community page below and reach out if you want to get listed! BECOME A MEMBERBECOME A MEMBER At REPO4EU we are highly committed to Open Science in the way we approach the dissemination of our project-specific tools and resources -from whitepapers to key scientific results stemming from our platform’s validation pilots. In keeping with this philosophy, we have created Drug Repurposing Central, a one-stop shop for everything you ever wanted to know about drug repurposing and our network medicine approach. Hosted on ScienceOpen, this supercollection includes two diamond open access journals (“Drug Repurposing” and “Network Medicine”), together with a literature collection that provides updates on all developments in the field of drug repurposing based on expert search algorithms. REPO4EU’s first public deliverables have also been published. As a bonus, Drug Repurposing Central implements Scite.ai “smart citations” badges, leveraging AI technology to assess whether a citation supports, mentions or contrasts the cited claim. Next stop: Drug Repurposing Central DISCOVER DRUG REPURPOSING CENTRALDISCOVER DRUG REPURPOSING CENTRAL Our collection of Knowledge Pills Drug repurposing is such an interdisciplinary field that we thought long and hard about how best to highlight the core principles that drive REPO4EU in an accessible way. This is how our Knowledge Pills have come to be: a series of easily digestible, highly effective, bite-sized pieces of content packed into short explainer videos covering the key concepts and innovation of our project: the why, the what, the who and the how. Have a look via the link below and make sure to subscribe for more! HAVE A KNOWLEDGE PILLHAVE A KNOWLEDGE PILL Last May, the European Medicines Agency Innovation Task Force held an online briefing meeting with 12 key REPO4EU participants, 11 EMA experts and 4 external experts to discuss potential requirements for clinical trials following our precision medicine approach to drug repurposing. They largely agreed that mechanism-based network pharmacology considerations might greatly reduce the need for preclinical animal data if combinations of low-dose approved drugs are used, and that Phase I clinical trials in healthy individuals will not be necessary in many cases. Whether conditional approval can be given based on bioinformatics and other in silico data will have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Also back in May, our coordinator visited REPO4EU's project officer, Monica Ensini, at her Brussels office. During the vivid and productive exchange, Monica was extremely appreciative about our project. She reiterated the high hopes that the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA) is investing in REPO4EU and that the eyes of many important officials are on us for this reason. The fact that our organ-agnostic concept of medicine puts innovative science first, and will develop a European drug repurposing infrastructure only at the very end, received special attention. Liaising with the EMA-ITF Insights from our Project Officer © REPO4EU 2023