Evgenia (Evie) Mengou (Director, aPODD) describes the charity’s mission to find better and kinder treatments for children with cancer, as quickly as possible. Evie explains some of aPODD’s key successes and challenges in drug repurposing projects and how AI has been used to speed up the process of delivering treatments to patients. For those looking to enter into drug repurposing research, Evie provides some tips about initiating projects, and sharing results with the rare diseases community.

One of aPODD’s key successes to date has been their identification of a treatment for medulloblastoma. Partnering with Healx to use AI and computational biology to screen thousands of drug profiles, aPODD were able to shortlist 10 drugs as potential medulloblastoma treatments for further investigation. To test these candidates, aPODD are collaborating with the University of Nottingham Children’s Brain Tumour Research Centre (CBTRC), who will use medulloblastoma assays in the first round of in vitro testing. Once two or three candidates have been selected, it is hoped that preclinical in vivo studies will be initiated in 2020. Visit here for more information.