Opinion: Don’t let ‘shelved assets’ gather dust. Make them into new lifesaving drugs
Life-science companies have changed the world with the breakthrough vaccines and therapeutics they created — and continue to create — to combat Covid-19. And thanks to the new technologies they developed during the pandemic, new medicines for other diseases could be just around the corner. But shelved assets — existing compounds gathering dust on companies’ shelves — may represent another round of medical miracles just waiting to be tested in clinical trials.
The development of new treatments inevitably involves ideas that don’t pan out. Though pharmaceutical companies generally patent these ideas, when further research and development into them ceases they become shelved assets that get no more attention.
