Philadelphia-based disease research nonprofit, Every Cure, has received a $48.3 million federal contract to help doctors find new uses for already approved medications with the help of artificial intelligence, writes Sarah Gantz for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The company is developing an AI-powered matchmaking program that will scan both tens of thousands of approved medications and rare diseases in an attempt to find potential matches.

Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a National Institutes of Health research funding agency, awarded the three-year contract.

“Rather than the current, one-step-at-a-time drug discovery process, we have an opportunity to use artificial intelligence to rapidly understand how already approved drugs could be effective against other diseases,” said Renee Wegrzyn, the agency’s director, in a statement.

David Fajgenbaum, an immunologist and associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founded Every Cure after his experience with Castleman disease. As a third-year medical student at Penn, he helped his team of doctors discover that the form of Castleman disease he had could be treated with a medication that had been originally designed to prevent the recipient’s body from rejecting donated organs.

“I’m alive because of a drug that wasn’t made for my disease,” he said.

Read more about Every Cure and how the funding will help scale its operations at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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