Edition of 15 November 2019

The International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC) was launched in 2011 to stimulate and coordinate and encourage translational, preclinical and clinical research. As part of its actions for therapeutic development, it decided to set up a multi-stakeholder Data Mining and Repurposing (DMR) Task Force to examine the potential of applying biomedical data mining strategies to identify new opportunities to use existing pharmaceutical compounds in new ways and to accelerate the pace of drug development for rare disease patients.

The task force presented the results of its research examining how to better support data mining efforts that can accelerate the development of therapies for rare diseases in a recently published article in the Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases. It identifies four strategic infrastructure investment areas to focus on in order to accelerate rare disease research productivity and drug development:

• improving the capture and sharing of self-reported patient data;
• better integration of existing research data;
• increasing experimental testing capacity;
• sharing of rare disease research and development expertise.

Furthermore, they add that according to their research, the medical community has yet to realise the full potential of the drugs and compounds that are already available and should look towards improving the capacity to capture serendipitous findings and developing new methods to systematically identify these opportunities.