Indication Finder™, a New Crowdsourcing Tool for Drug Repurposing

Transparency Life Sciences (TLS), the world's first drug development company based on open innovation, today announced the launch of Indication Finder™, a survey-based crowdsourcing tool designed to identify promising new indications for existing drug candidates. TLS intends to use Indication Finder initially to crowdsource new applications for compounds included in the drug repurposing program, Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules, sponsored by the U.S. National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), a division of the National Institutes of Health.

“At TLS we believe that open innovation principles and tools hold great promise for radically redesigning a drug development process that is slow, costly and unproductive,” commented Tomasz Sablinski, MD, PhD, co-founder and CEO of TLS. “Our Indication Finder is a simple, powerful tool designed to harness the wisdom of the crowd to identify promising new indications for drug candidates that have stalled in development. We see this as an ideal area for leveraging the power of crowdsourcing. Early feedback from participants confirms that Indication Finder is thought-provoking, stimulating and fun to use.”

The TLS Indication Finder is initially focused on the 58 compounds currently included in the NCATS program. TLS provides links to background information on the compounds and to relevant external resources that facilitate informed participation. The Indication Finder presents participants with a series of questions relating to specific development issues for the compound. After participants have reviewed the background information, the Indication Finder itself takes only 10-15 minutes to complete. Responses are then aggregated and presented to the crowd for analysis and discussion.

New indications for the compounds that participants help select may become TLS development candidates. These will be developed using the TLS Protocol Builder™, a proprietary crowdsourcing platform for designing better clinical trials. The trials will be conducted using remote patient monitoring and data capture technologies that minimize the need for inconvenient and costly patient site visits, thereby significantly reducing their overall cost.


“Our unique approach to drug development is highly relevant to drug repurposing,” noted Marc Foster, co-founder and COO of TLS. “As open innovation gains traction in the pharmaceutical industry, we are well positioned to form multiple partnerships to develop compounds identified by NCATS and others using our open development process. Our approach is based on crowdsourcing for indication selection and clinical trial design and uses 21st century telemonitoring and data collection technologies to dramatically reduce the cost of clinical trials. We believe our approach has the potential to enable far more compounds to be developed for new indications, and we expect to be a player in this effort.”

The NCATS Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules effort is a collaborative pilot program designed to develop partnerships between pharmaceutical companies and the biomedical research community to advance therapeutic development. It matches researchers with a selection of molecular compounds from industry to test ideas for new therapeutic uses, with the ultimate goal of identifying promising new treatments for patients.