University Researchers to Seek New Uses for Experimental Drugs

The National Institutes of Health is making a new push to find productive uses for abandoned experimental drugs. The NIH has been pressing the idea that a drug that has won safety approvals for testing against one type of disease might turn out to be useful against other diseases, thereby saving lives as well as recouping the large expenditures of time and money on research and initial safety tests. In a new effort, the NIH announced on Thursday that it had reached an agreement with three leading drug companies that will share their abandoned experimental drugs with university scientists, who will now look for new uses for those drugs.