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New Therapeutic Uses at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)/National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Therapeutic development is a costly, complex and time-consuming process. The average length of time from target discovery to approval of a new drug is about 14 years. The failure rate during this process exceeds 95 percent, and the cost per successful drug can be $1 billion or more. The high therapeutic development failure rate means there are many existing therapeutic candidates that could be repurposed for use in a new disease indication.

NCATS designed its New Therapeutic Uses program to align with one of its primary goals: to foster approaches that improve the translational research pipeline and ultimately accelerate the pace at which discoveries are turned into new preventions, treatments and cures for human diseases.