The Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute (PMI) team has partnered with Every Cure on a groundbreaking project to build a large drug-repurposing database. The project, called ML/AI-enabled Therapeutic Repurposing In eXtended uses (MATRIX), received a contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) for up to $48 million, announced earlier this year at a White House event.
Every Cure is a nonprofit organization that works to repurpose existing medicines for the treatment of various diseases – a mission that is also critical to PMI.
The purpose of MATRIX is to build a large AI-driven, drug-repurposing database to find potential fits of FDA-approved drugs with various diseases. While some drugs are regularly prescribed for specific diseases or diagnoses, researchers hope that this program could find potential in already approved drugs for the treatment of other diseases where the drugs may not have been previously considered.
“The database is really a giant table with drugs on one side and diseases on the other,” said Matt Might, Ph.D., director of PMI. “Inside each cell is a combined computational prediction about the potential fit of that drug for that disease.”
MATRIX is a similar program to PMI’s program, mediKanren, but on a larger scale.
mediKanren is an AI-driven tool that identifies treatments for patients with rare diseases. The software contains a knowledge base consisting of anything that has ever been published in medical literature. It is also a logical reasoning engine that can deduce new facts based on what it knows. Within seconds of inputting patient symptoms, the tool can provide treatment recommendations.
“MATRIX would work at the scale of millions of predictions (anywhere from 30-60 million predictions, depending on how approved drugs are defined and definable diseases), rather than one patient at a time,” said Might.
Might, who serves on the Every Cure Advisory Board, has known David Fajgenbaum, M.D., MBA, M.Sc., co-founder and president of Every Cure, since their earliest days as patient advocates.
“We've long dreamed of working together on a project at this scale that could impact millions of patients,” said Might.
As MATRIX progresses, mediKanren will serve as one of the individual predictors with its results being combined with several others. PMI will also be one of the teams to make predictions about the fit of each drug for each disease and support the Every Cure team and their efforts on the overall project.
While the project will have to potential to help all patients, it is likely to be especially beneficial to those with rare and neglected diseases, a patient population at the center of PMI’s mission.