Worth scrolling this interview to reach the question:
“Can you please outline Findacure’s new approach to funding trials using Social Impact Bonds?”
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Finding Treatments For Rare Diseases: An Interview With Dr Richard Thompson
News Medical
How is Findacure helping to find treatments for rare diseases?
Findacure is setting up a generic drug repurposing programme for rare diseases. We are working to identify viable drug repurposing projects, which have an existing evidence base suggesting a disease modifying effect in a rare disease.
Once identified, Findacure will then establish collaborative project teams including patient groups, clinicians, and researchers, who can deliver clinical trials to test the efficacy of these drugs in the new rare disease patient population.
To fund this work Findacure is trying to establish a new funding mechanism, called a social impact bond, which aims to use social finance and health system savings to fund drug repurposing research.
A social impact bond is another way to secure investment into drug development. We aim to secure enough investment to fund ten generic drug repurposing clinical trials. These will all be designed to test the efficacy of the existing drug in a rare disease.
The crucial part of the model is how we generate investment returns. Conventionally, money is made through the sale of the drug – this is not our aim. Instead we are aiming to repurpose drugs for diseases that are currently expensive to manage for the NHS.
If this is the case, providing a new disease modifying drug at the low price of a generic will save the NHS money, as well as improve patient health. We are seeking to access some of these savings from the NHS. These savings will be used to pay back the initial investment in all of the trials.
If enough trials are successful, we should have enough money left over to fund further repurposing trials.