Transparency Life Sciences Launches Indication Finder™ Crowdsourcing Tool For Drug Repurposing

NEW YORK, Oct. 24, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Transparency Life Sciences (TLS), the world's first drug development company based on open innovation, today announced the launch of Indication Finder™, a survey-based crowdsourcing tool designed to identify promising new indications for existing drug candidates.  TLS intends to use Indication Finder initially to crowdsource new applications for compounds included in the drug repurposing program, Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules, sponsored by the U.S. National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), a division of the National Institutes of Health.

"At TLS we believe that open innovation principles and tools hold great promise for radically redesigning a drug development process that is slow, costly and unproductive," commented Tomasz Sablinski, MD, PhD, co-founder and CEO of TLS.  "Our Indication Finder is a simple, powerful tool designed to harness the wisdom of the crowd to identify promising new indications for drug candidates that have stalled in development.  We see this as an ideal area for leveraging the power of crowdsourcing.  Early feedback from participants confirms that Indication Finder is thought-provoking, stimulating and fun to use."

The TLS Indication Finder is initially focused on the 58 compounds currently included in the NCATS program.  TLS provides links to background information on the compounds and to relevant external resources that facilitate informed participation.  The Indication Finder presents participants with a series of questions relating to specific development issues for the compound.  After participants have reviewed the background information, the Indication Finder itself takes only 10-15 minutes to complete.  Responses are then aggregated and presented to the crowd for analysis and discussion.  Experts will curate the resulting data.  All those interested are encouraged to visit the Indication Finder at http://www.transparencyls.com/node/115.

New indications for the compounds that participants help select may become TLS development candidates.  These will be developed using the TLS Protocol Builder™, a proprietary crowdsourcing platform for designing better clinical trials.  The trials will be conducted using remote patient monitoring and data capture technologies that minimize the need for inconvenient and costly patient site visits, thereby significantly reducing their overall cost.

Marc Foster, co-founder and COO of TLS, will discuss Indication Finder and the company's approach to designing and conducting cost-effective clinical trials at the 2^nd Annual Drug Repurposing & Indications Discovery Conference being held October 23-24, 2012 near San Francisco, California.

"Our unique approach to drug development is highly relevant to drug repurposing," noted Marc Foster.  "As open innovation gains traction in the pharmaceutical industry, we are well positioned to form multiple partnerships to develop compounds identified by NCATS and others using our open development process.  Our approach is based on crowdsourcing for indication selection and clinical trial design and uses 21^st century telemonitoring and data collection technologies to dramatically reduce the cost of clinical trials.  We believe our approach has the potential to enable far more compounds to be developed for new indications, and we expect to be a player in this effort."

Indication Finder is the second crowdsourcing tool TLS has developed since the company's launch in early 2012.  It joins Protocol Builder™, which elicits input from patients, physicians and researchers to design clinical trials more efficiently and with greater relevance to clinical practice.  Transparency is a core principle of TLS, and the company intends to make the results of its crowdsourcing activities available to other researchers and organizations on an ongoing basis.

The NCATS Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules effort is a collaborative pilot program designed to develop partnerships between pharmaceutical companies and the biomedical research community to advance therapeutic development.  It matches researchers with a selection of molecular compounds from industry to test ideas for new therapeutic uses, with the ultimate goal of identifying promising new treatments for patients.

For more information on the 2^nd Annual Drug Repurposing & Indications Discovery Conference, visit http://www.drugrepositioningconference.com/index/.

For more information on TLS, visit http://www.transparencyls.com.

About Transparency Life Sciences
Transparency Life Sciences (TLS) is the world's first drug development company based on open innovation.  TLS acquires promising drug compounds for significant unmet medical needs and tests them in clinical trials that leverage crowdsourcing methods, advances in telemonitoring and data transparency.  The company expects to realize significantly reduced costs and clinical timelines.  To learn more about TLS, visit the company's crowdsourcing web platform at http://www.transparencyls.com.

SOURCE Transparency Life Sciences