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Drug Repositioning

Huge numbers of compounds enter the drugs pipeline each year, with only a small number making it into the clinic. The reason for lack of success with most of these is due to issues with safety and efficacy, but in many cases the drug may be safe in a certain subset of the population. A key focus on drug repositioning is on rescuing drugs that have failed and identifying or creating alternative development routes for those drugs.

At Almac we can offer repositioning approaches that can be employed for existing drugs to identify a route to market. We can identify the subset of patients for whom the drug is safe and develop a companion diagnostic which could 'rescue' or 'reposition' the failed drug.

At Almac we work with FFPE, which enables retrospective analysis of these samples for the identification of predictive biomarkers of response. The fact that clinical trials have already been carried out for these drugs means that the necessary samples to carry out such studies are usually available in tissue banks as FFPE blocks.