EMBARK HEALTHCARE is made up of a diverse group of companies within the pharmaceutical industry. Each is unique in the field of medicine it is pursuing — but all the companies have a common theme.

All are “Indication Discovery Companies,” meaning they identify new therapeutic opportunities for existing drugs. We don’t discover drugs. We discover new ways to use existing drugs.

Drugs are essential to helping treat the over 400 million people worldwide who suffer from some 7,000 diseases that have no effective treatment — yet new drug development is becoming increasingly difficult, costly and time consuming.

In the U.S., the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on research has approximately been halved every 9 years since 1950, falling around 80-fold in inflation-adjusted terms.

This is why drug repositioning, which seeks new efficacies among existing drugs, is gaining in popularity. Over the last 5 years, repurposed drugs have accounted for 45% of drug approvals in the U.S., generating some $500 billion in annual revenue.

As new drugs become increasing difficult to find and bring to market, drug repurposing represents a critical source for big pharmaceutical companies to help bolster their late-stage development pipelines.

EMBARK HEALTHCARE’s portfolio of companies are proud to be at the forefront of this movement.

Pressure on the industry caused by the ‘innovation gap’ of rising development costs and stagnant product output have become major reasons for the growing interest in drug repurposing.

Companies have emerged offering a variety of broad platforms for identifying new indications, and some have been successful in building their own pipelines of candidates for which the risks and timelines associated with further clinical development are reduced.

In the current economic climate, two factors may continue the flow of compounds into repurposing projects. First, the need to expand product pipelines with new projects has become more acute, especially with projects for which an element of the risk has been removed. Second, the pool of potential compounds abandoned for strategic reasons is growing.

These factors may continue to provide opportunities for academia as well as a small number of successful indications discovery companies.

Source: Therapeutic Drug Discovery, Drug Discovery World