Drug repurposing and benefits

Drug repurposing involves establishing new medical uses for already known drugs, including approved drugs, discontinued drugs and drugs already trialled in humans for other diseases.

Island is using a biology and known viral target-driven approach to develop and identify developmentally advanced drugs for other diseases that can then be used as novel antiviral drugs. This approach to drug development has the potential to dramatically reduce development time, risk and cost.

Island's drug repurposing strategy leverages previous expenditure and research by other parties into manufacturing development, pre-clinical work and clinical studies in humans in order to rapidly enter into Phase II clinical trials for Island's drug development. 

ISLA-101 was originally identified by Johnson & Johnson and studied for its antitumor and chemo-preventive properties in numerous clinical trials, including in 'Phase III' clinical trials, taking ISLA-101 through 48 clinical trials and 1000’s of patients. 

Geographic distribution of previous ISLA-101 clinical trials

These clinical trials have shown ISLA-101 to be a safe drug in humans and has substantially de-risked ISLA-101 for the re-purposed anti-viral solution that the Island Group is pursuing.  As such, there is considerable information regarding the safety and bioavailability of ISLA-101 in the clinic.