A New Approach to Repurposing: Ditch the Hypotheses

Melior Discovery Inc., an 18-month old repurposing start-up in the Philadelphia suburbs, isn’t your typical biotech. The firm has no proprietary technology, hasn’t in-licensed any compounds, doesn’t boast an in-depth knowledge of specific biological targets or families of targets, and doesn’t keep an eagle eye on the latest advances in the literature to build its hypotheses about which compounds may succeed at treating which diseases. In fact, says Melior president and CEO Andrew Reaume, PhD, "ours isn’t a hypothesis-driven approach at all, and we don’t rely on linkages or disease associates or gene expression changes," he says. "We don’t do that kind of detective work."

But what Melior does do has attracted a small handful of pharmaceutical partners, including Merck & Co. Inc. , and has allowed the 15-person company to build an early stage...