Platforms to Identify Candidate Drugs – PICD
Harnessing AI and Real-World Evidence to Accelerate Drug Repurposing for National Health Security Threats
What if we could develop treatments for national health security threats faster, at lower cost, and with less risk?
Despite substantial advances in biomedical research, significant gaps remain in the availability of therapeutic MCMs for national health security threats.
Traditional drug development is too slow, costly and risky to meet the urgent demands of national emergencies. Developing a new therapeutic can require more than a decade, cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars and still face a likelihood of failure in clinical development.
These challenges are compounded for emerging threats where uncertain or limited commercial markets provide little financial incentive for industry investment and as a result, create a dependency on government funding and delays in drug development during critical response windows.
Despite substantial advances in biomedical research, significant gaps remain in the availability of therapeutic MCMs for national health security threats.
Traditional drug development is too slow, costly and risky to meet the urgent demands of national emergencies. Developing a new therapeutic can require more than a decade, cost hundreds of millions to billions of dollars and still face a likelihood of failure in clinical development.
These challenges are compounded for emerging threats where uncertain or limited commercial markets provide little financial incentive for industry investment and as a result, create a dependency on government funding and delays in drug development during critical response windows.
Our Solution
VITAL and BARDA seek to bring together complementary capabilities across the scientific and technology communities to establish platforms that can rapidly identify and evaluate promising therapeutic candidates—including repurposed drugs, repositioned drugs, natural products, and combination therapies—for emerging national health security threats.
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Key Focus Area
VITAL and BARDA seek technologies and approaches that can predict treatment benefit among patients to increase the probability of demonstrating therapeutic efficacy during clinical development and to guide treatment decisions during clinical care for improved patient outcomes.
These technologies may be based on phenotyping, sub-phenotyping, endotyping, genotyping, and/or other approaches to identify patients likely to benefit from specific treatments.
Example technologies may include but are not limited to assays, lab tests, and software as medical devices.
Addressing Heterogeneity of Treatment Effect in Health Security Threat Indications: Patient subtyping technologies to improve treatment decision-making and patient outcomes.
Development, Evaluation, and Validation (DEV) Teaming
Join us for one of our info sessions to answer all your questions about Funding Opportunities and Programs made available through the VITAL Hub. This session is perfect for innovators, entrepreneurs, and biotech startups pioneering the future of innovative therapeutics solutions.
Goal: Systematically identify, evaluate, and prioritize existing therapeutics for new indications through an AI-enabled drug repurposing pipeline.
- Acquire relevant data: Aggregate and integrate data sources, including biomedical databases, scientific literature, and large, diverse real-world datasets, with access to near real-time data where available.
- Identify candidates: Apply existing or develop new multimodal AI models to generate a ranked list of repurposing candidates supported by transparent scientific rationale.
- Validate findings: Assess biological plausibility using approaches such as real-world evidence, in silico mechanistic predictions (e.g., pharmacokinetics, dose optimization, safety), and disease or treatment-response simulations.
- Prioritize final candidates: Determine which candidates may be best for advanced development based on technical and translational feasibility, including manufacturability, intellectual property, commercial viability, sponsor engagement, and access to candidate drugs to inform future development decisions.
Goal: Systematically identify, evaluate, and prioritize existing therapeutics for new indications through an AI-enabled drug repurposing pipeline.
- Acquire relevant data: Aggregate and integrate data sources, including biomedical databases, scientific literature, and large, diverse real-world datasets, with access to near real-time data where available.
- Identify candidates: Apply existing or develop new multimodal AI models to generate a ranked list of repurposing candidates supported by transparent scientific rationale.
- Validate findings: Assess biological plausibility using approaches such as real-world evidence, in silico mechanistic predictions (e.g., pharmacokinetics, dose optimization, safety), and disease or treatment-response simulations.
- Prioritize final candidates: Determine which candidates may be best for advanced development based on technical and translational feasibility, including manufacturability, intellectual property, commercial viability, sponsor engagement, and access to candidate drugs to inform future development decisions.
Potential Initial Use Cases
- Viral Hemorrhagic Fever (focus on Ebola)
- Botulinum toxin (focus on intracellular intoxication)
- Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS)
- Radiation injury
Potential Use Cases
Viral Hemorrhagic Fever (focus on Ebola)
Botulinum toxin (focus on intracellular intoxication)
Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS)
Radiation injury
Advancing Solutions That Protect Public Health
BARDA primarily develops medical countermeasures to counter acute threats and does not support research and development or acceleration in the areas of oncology or chronic disease.
However, BARDA does partner with innovators and companies developing platform and multi-use technologies. Applicants can include data from other use cases so long as BARDA funding will be used to support research and development of the BARDA-relevant use cases.
Applications for Type Funding
Are Now Closed
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