Dormant therapies: hope for the rare disease community

Abstract

At the margins of the orphan drug world are found what have become known as dormant drugs or dormant therapies – drugs that have been abandoned as they failed to meet designated clinical endpoints in their development and for whom patents have expired. There are also literally millions of compounds disclosed in old patents that cannot be patented again and were overlooked in favor of a few. If partial research and/or development has been done on compounds and drugs, whether failed or not, then that experience must be protected to incent firms to mine the wealth of science already completed in the hopes of finding effective therapies for some of the most debilitating and lethal diseases known.

Keywords:

• dormant therapies
• drug re-purposing
• intellectual property
• market exclusivity
• rare diseases

Declaration of Interest

No funding was received from any source by any means to write this article. The author is a retired professor from McMaster University in Canada and currently works part-time as the Executive Director of The Cameron Institute, a health policy think tank. The author has no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.