Every Cure, a Philadelphia-based disease research nonprofit co-founded by Penn Medicine’s Dr. David Fajgenbaum, has received a $48.3 million federal contract to develop an artificial intelligence-powered matchmaking program to help doctors find new uses for previously approved medications.
AI based on specific algorithms will scan tens of thousands of approved medications and rare diseases to find potential matches. The approach is designed to automate and expedite a process that is currently performed on a case-by-case basis, typically when a medical team needs to find a new treatment for a patient’s rare disease.
The three-year contract was awarded by Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a research funding agency created within the National Institutes of Health in 2022 with the goal of expediting breakthrough medical treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases. Read more here.