Reboot Rx

Cancer patients urgently need more effective treatments that are accessible to everyone. There is a major untapped opportunity to rapidly improve outcomes for cancer patients in underserved communities worldwide and lower healthcare costs by repurposing existing generic drugs. Reboot Rx acts as the bridge between academic research and patient care by identifying the most promising generic drugs to repurpose for cancer, developing innovative funding models for clinical trials, and ultimately changing the standard of care for patients.

We have developed AI-powered technology to synthesize the published data on all 1,000 non-cancer generic drugs tested for cancer treatment and generate a ranked list of drug-cancer pairs. The next phase of our work involves improving the performance of our evidence synthesis pipeline, increasing our confidence in the highest ranked repurposing candidates, and getting the most promising treatments to patients who desperately need them. 

The Elevate Prize funding would be used to identify the 10 most promising generic drugs to repurpose for cancer. To achieve our objectives, we need to recruit key scientific and technical staff. These new team members will enable us to scale our organization and reach our goals considerably faster.

My motivation for starting Reboot Rx stemmed from both my professional and personal experiences with cancer. While I was working as a cancer researcher, my mom was diagnosed with the blood cancer multiple myeloma. It was then that I realized we could create new and affordable cancer treatments faster using drugs that already exist, and we could further accelerate the process using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. My goal is to build collaborations across disciplines and sectors to expand treatment options for cancer patients. Through technology and innovative funding models, we can scale our approach to quickly reach more patients. 

Previously, I was Scientific Research Director in the Department of Data Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I earned a PhD in Computational and Systems Biology from MIT and conducted translational cancer research as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I received the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Community Service Award and the 40 Under 40 in Cancer Award, and I was recently selected as a CHM Patrick J. McGovern Tech for Humanity Prize Changemaker finalist.

Each year worldwide, 18 million people are diagnosed with cancer and 10 million cancer patients die. Lower- and middle-income countries account for 70% of cancer deaths, in part due to lack of accessible treatments. Reboot Rx is the tech nonprofit startup dedicated to saving the lives of cancer patients using repurposed generic drugs. Repurposing generic drugs is the fastest way to develop affordable treatments for all cancer patients. Hundreds of non-cancer generic drugs have already shown promise for cancer in published studies.

Two challenges stand in the way of realizing the potential of repurposed generic drugs. The first challenge is the amount of data that needs to be reviewed, which includes hundreds of thousands of published studies and real-world evidence. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Reboot Rx is building AI technology for rapid evidence synthesis and prioritization of drug candidates. The second challenge is the lack of funding for the necessary definitive clinical trials for generics due to a market failure. Reboot Rx is bringing together key stakeholders to develop new models for funding clinical trials with generics and for incorporating generics into the standard of care for patients.

Reboot Rx is the only organization using AI technology to repurpose generic drugs. Our advantage lies in our comprehensive approach to scale generic drug repurposing using diverse data types, technology, and new approaches to fund clinical trials. Our technology was built for the specific purpose of synthesizing outcome data for cancer treatments, with deep domain expertise for biomedical training data, machine learning models, and context-specific rules. It therefore has higher accuracy than AI platforms that were not developed specifically for this use case.

As a not-for-profit company, we have unique advantages that allow us to put patients first and foster cross-sector collaborations. We pursue treatments with the highest potential to improve patient outcomes, regardless of profitability. Generics are already FDA-approved, safe, and available around the world - many are on the WHO Model Lists of Essential Medicines. We strive to make the output of our AI technology freely available to immediately benefit society and improve clinical decision-making. We are able to access data and expert collaborators to accelerate our research, and we can work with cancer foundations, governments, and healthcare payers to create new models for funding trials and changing the standard of care.

Recently, we applied our evidence synthesis technology to aggregate data on how COVID-19 and its treatments affect cancer patients, which would have taken years to do manually. We released a free, interactive dashboard for anyone to explore the data and conducted analyses aided by our technology. Our results are now informing how doctors treat cancer patients with COVID-19.

Following the success of our technology for COVID-19, we’re scaling our approach to synthesize the published clinical data on all non-cancer generic drugs tested for the treatment of cancer. We have a preliminary ranked list of drug-cancer pairs. Next, we will identify the most promising drugs to repurpose for cancer and advance them into the clinic.

The cheap generic corticosteroid dexamethasone emerged as the first proven treatment for COVID-19 and is an example of the rapid impact that generic drug repurposing can have for patients everywhere. Repurposing generic drugs for cancer could have an equally enormous impact on our society, global healthcare systems, and economy. Just one repurposed generic drug has the potential to each year save the lives of 50,000 cancer patients and save $2 billion in healthcare costs.

We help the 18 million people diagnosed with cancer each year to live longer and better lives by informing them directly and through their doctors and cancer researchers about promising treatment options.

The best example of how our findings can be made available to these constituents is our Reboot: COVID-Cancer Project, a proof-of-concept of our technology. We synthesized data on how COVID-19 and its treatments affect cancer patients. Our results were shared with more than 30,000 patients, doctors, and researchers at 120 cancer centers to inform research and clinical decision-making.

We are now applying our approach to our core mission and synthesizing the published data on all non-cancer generic drugs that have been tested for the treatment of cancer. Recently, a patient group approached us to identify generic drugs for prostate cancer with our AI technology. We launched this project with a focus on treatments for the deadly metastatic prostate cancer, and we will have results within a year. The results will be made available to the 5 million people with prostate cancer, their doctors, and researchers, and will be used to decide which repurposed therapies hold the most value and should be advanced into the clinic.

We have two primary goals: to reduce mortality from cancer and to bring more affordable treatment options to patients worldwide. Nearly 7 million people die from cancer each year in lower- and middle-income countries, in part due to lack of accessible treatments. With new treatments based on low-cost generic drugs, more people in resource-limited settings will have access to life-saving medicines.

To save lives, we first need to identify the most promising generic drugs to repurpose for cancer and test them in large clinical trials. We are measuring our progress based on the number of studies we review, promising treatments identified, funders recruited, and trials initiated. Our activities focus on:

1. Prioritizing drug repurposing candidates based on the totality of existing evidence, degree of unmet medical need, and feasibility of implementation. 

2. Building relationships with foundations that have expressed interest in funding clinical trials and medical institutions that have the ability to run the trials.

3. Proposing policy changes that would engage governments in funding repurposing efforts to accelerate treatments for cancer and other diseases.

It has been a challenge to communicate who we are and what we do. That’s because Reboot Rx breaks the mold as a nonprofit developing cutting-edge technology to improve cancer treatment. Our unique positioning means that people sometimes struggle to understand why we are a not-for-profit company and whether we are a tech or a cancer research firm. We are most successful when we find partners who think “outside the box” of traditional nonprofit organization business models. Finding those innovative thinkers can be challenging as well. 

We have been fortunate to be recognized with several awards, including from Fast Forward, Google.org, MassChallenge, The Greater Sum Foundation, MassBio, New England Innovation Awards, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Promoting these accolades helps us explain how we are an innovative organization. Over the next year, we plan to refine our messaging with the help of communications experts and leverage public relations opportunities to increase our visibility and solidify what our brand stands for. With the support of Elevate mentors, we will improve our messaging and build more partnerships with those who can help us scale.

The concept of repurposing generic drugs for cancer is not yet mainstream. We want to change that. Due to COVID-19, the world has just started to recognize that repurposing generics is the fastest way to get new treatments to patients globally. With the help of our technology, we can now breakthrough to impact patients suffering from cancer and increase health equity in communities where few cancer treatment options exist. Governments and major institutions should be funding the necessary clinical research, and pharmaceutical companies should be helping to bring the drugs to market for the new uses in order to impact the standard of care. We are advocating for patients who know that the status quo is inadequate. We are showing the world that developing new cancer treatments does not need to be driven by maximizing profits - we’re taking a different approach driven by maximizing patient benefit for those who urgently need additional treatment options.

Elevate’s strategic marketing and media expertise will help us drive lasting change. This larger platform will inspire more people into action, including major funders, science and technology experts who may join our team, and key stakeholders like governments, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare payers.

Reboot Rx is committed to maintaining diversity at every level of our company. We value and practice respect and open-mindedness to create an inclusive environment. As a female founder and CEO, I am proud of the organization I have built. My co-founder and CTO/COO Pradeep Mangalath identifies as a person of color. Currently, over 75% of our team members (including student interns) identify as female, and half of our Board of Directors is composed of women, including our Founding Board Chair Andi Pollinger. Our team includes individuals who identify as LGBTQIA+ and people with diverse cultural backgrounds and racial identities. In June 2021, my work to build an inclusive team was recognized with The Commonwealth Institute’s Extraordinary Women Advancing Healthcare Award, and I was selected by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center and the Baker-Polito Administration for the Massachusetts Next Generation Initiative (MassNextGen), a competitive award program that supports women entrepreneurs leading early-stage life sciences companies. We are actively working to recruit qualified individuals from all backgrounds for leadership positions. Visibility from the Elevate Prize will help us do this.

We’re leveraging our combined expertise in cancer research, technology, and business to help cancer patients. My background is in cancer research. Our CTO/COO previously managed product development and digital strategy for Fortune 500 companies as a management consultant at Deloitte. He holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina and a Masters in Biomedical Informatics from Harvard Medical School. Our Board Chair has an MBA and 30 years of experience as a marketing strategist in the financial services industry. She currently mentors MassChallenge startup companies. Board Director Skip Irving, MBA, has advised pharmaceutical and biotech companies for 30+ years and serves as Chairman of the Board at the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. Board Treasurer David Noymer, MBA, was the Chief Financial Officer of The Greater Boston Food Bank for over a decade.

Together, we channel our personal motivations to create a better future for cancer patients. I lost my mom to cancer, Pradeep’s wife is currently undergoing cancer treatment, and Andi is a cancer survivor. We are acutely aware of the urgency to find treatment options. At all times, our work is driven by what is most likely to save the lives of patients.

I faced a difficult situation when I realized that our science and technology groups were not working together effectively and that this was hindering our progress. Our science team develops biomedical datasets that our tech team uses to train machine learning algorithms, and then our science team reviews the results of the machine learning algorithms. This iterative process improves the performance of our algorithms, and it is critical that the teams communicate regularly and clearly. This type of collaborative work does not always come naturally to scientists who have mostly worked as individual contributors, and this caused a big problem for our organization.

I had to instill a culture of collaboration. First I sought advice from my Board and organizational development professionals. Then I restructured how the teams work by creating a task dashboard, conducting joint planning sessions, and instituting cross-team Slack channels. Today the teams are well integrated and our work is back on track. This experience helped clarify how important collaboration is to our success, and I learned to always prioritize our mission and the well-being of my entire organization.

Fast Forward’s Demo Day: https://youtu.be/HUy0DLBh44w

2020 Annual Drug Repurposing Conference: https://youtu.be/BnIn_5dHYxk

Funding from the Elevate Prize will allow us to hire key talent to accelerate our work and find more promising repurposing candidates more quickly. Specifically, we will hire a biomedical scientist, machine learning engineer, clinical scientist, technical product manager, user experience designer, and software engineer to help us optimize our AI technology and identify the top 10 drugs. This in turn will set us on a path to attract more funders and get us that much closer to bringing affordable, safe treatments to cancer patients worldwide. 

In the next five years, we aim to: 1. Develop a robust platform for literature surveillance, quantitative evidence synthesis, drug ranking, and rapid meta-analyses, 2. Advance the three most promising generic drugs into clinical trials in collaboration with medical institutions, and 3. Change the standard of care with two drugs where no new trial evidence is needed.

We have a number of collaborations that span our AI technology, cancer research, and policy work. AI technology: We have been working with computer scientist Byron Wallace at Northeastern University to apply his machine learning approaches in order to systematically identify gold standard data from randomized controlled clinical trials. Cancer research: We are collaborating with Professor Charles Swanton and his team at University College London and Cancer Research UK to use our technology to understand how COVID-19 and its treatments affect cancer patients. We are also partnering with prostate cancer patients, researchers, and doctors to identify repurposing opportunities for prostate cancer. This focused project will enable an end-to-end demonstration of our core capabilities, with clinical input and immediate patient impact. Policy: We are working with the Day One Project and Federation of American Scientists to propose a new federal program to support generic drug repurposing clinical trials and implementation in the standard of care. We also collaborate with the nonprofit Mission: Cure to scale funding for repurposing trials using outcomes-based financing mechanisms like social impact bonds.