Collaborative Use Repurposing Engine
Executive Summary
Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) are a group of parasitic and bacterial diseases that cause substantial illness for more than one billion people globally. Patients with NTDs, emerging or drug-resistant infections may lack adequate treatment options due to the limited number of drugs approved for these conditions. Out of necessity, healthcare practitioners try to use existing drugs in novel ways to treat these patients. At present, much of this clinical experience, regardless of whether the patient outcomes are positive or negative, is never reported or shared, and the knowledge is therefore lost.
CURE is a new tool designed to centrally capture and organize real-world information about how healthcare practitioners use existing drugs in novel ways to treat patients with neglected tropical diseases, emerging infections and drug-resistant infections when treatment options are limited or inadequate. It is currently publicly available in “beta” as an open-access website that enables healthcare practitioners throughout the world to contribute to the database by using a simple online form, a smartphone or other mobile device. In addition to submitting their own case reports, practitioners are also able to query and retrieve information from the database.
The team hopes to launch and deploy a fully vetted, field-tested, beta version of both the website and mobile app and to have the partnership framework in place for other organizations to join them.
A project supported by the: HHS Secretary's Ventures Fund
Team Members
Heather Stone (Project Lead), FDA
Leonard Sacks, FDA
Rose Tiernan, FDA
Nicole Silva, FDA
Noel Southall, NIH
Tim Sheils, NIH
Rajarshi Guha, NIH
Vid Nukala, US Embassy in India, HHS
Milestones
April 2015: Project receives support from the HHS Secretary's Ventures Fund
September 2016: Support from Secretary's Ventures ends
Project Sponsor
Janet Woodcock, Director, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Additional Information
Contributing Partners:
Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi)
TDR at the World Health Organization (WHO)
Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical Global Health Education
The mHealth Alliance
