2020 was an extraordinary year for Reboot Rx
By Laura Kleiman, PhD, Founder and CEO of Reboot Rx
We hope you and your family have been well during these challenging times. I'm delighted to share the rapid progress we’ve made this year despite the curveball of the pandemic.
We are so grateful to have received a $1.5 million donation last December, which enabled us to hit the ground running in 2020 towards our goal of saving the lives of cancer patients with existing non-cancer generic drugs. We built our evidence synthesis pipeline and a working prototype of our AI technology that efficiently prioritizes drug repurposing candidates at scale, and we completed a proof of concept of our technology.
Here are some highlights:
Organization. We established the independent 501(c)3 nonprofit Reboot Rx, built a stellar team, and grew our network of funding partners and collaborators.
Technology. We launched the Reboot: COVID-Cancer Project, a proof of concept of our technology with immediate patient impact. We used our technology to quickly sift through 225,000 published studies and registered trials and found the 1,000 studies most relevant for COVID-19 and cancer patients. We extracted key information from these studies and made the aggregated data freely available in interactive dashboards. Now we’re conducting the largest meta-analyses on COVID-19 and cancer to date in order to uncover whether certain cancer patient populations are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 and which treatments may be most effective.
Presentations. We presented our work at leading AI and cancer meetings, including the Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, the International Conference on Learning Representations, the Annual Drug Repurposing Conference, and the CCC19: COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium. We also have two papers that have been accepted for presentation at next year’s AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Recognition. We completed the Fast Forward Accelerator Program for tech nonprofits and won the New England Innovation Award. I received the 40 Under 40 in Cancer Award and was featured in Forbes.
Key milestone. By year end, we will have deployed our technology to synthesize the cancer data for all non-cancer generic drugs and generated an initial ranked list of the most promising generics to repurpose for the treatment of cancer.
Next year, we will advance our technology and datasets to increase confidence in the highest ranked drug repurposing candidates, and then move the top drug candidates forward to clinical trials or the standard of care. You can help us reach our next milestones by making a tax-deductible donation at https://rebootrx.org/donate.
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Wishing you all the best for 2021!