This is a puzzling conundrum, and a tough question to answer in an all-encompassing, truthful manner.
One of the common-sense answers is that it simply takes time for basic research results to be turned into medically exploitable treatments, and that the most easy-to-identify and easy-to-verify drug targets have already been successfully exploited while more complex disease phenotypes, such as mental disorders, will take much more time to be understood. Yet, scientists should constantly improve their approach and methodology, such as the bumpy transition from preclinical to clinical trials. In this project, we aim to smoothen this transition and to increase translatability of preclinical data.
Our consortium consists of preclinical researches, clinicians, systems biologists, data analysis specialists, computer programmers, experts on metabolism and personalized medicine, a pharmaceutical strategist, and a professional management and dissemination team. Given the explosive pace of knowledge gain and depth of specialization, it is crucial to join forces in multidisciplinary projects in order to tackle questions that one person, company or laboratory alone could never solve. Together, we introduce a novel concept for in silico prediction for mechanism-based drug repurposing. Our approach innovates two different biomedical product classes, drugs and diagnostics, leads to novel scientific insights, and will most likely have a positive socio-economic impact as drug repurposing requires a much shorter timeline and costs less, compared to de novo drug design.