Abstract
According to the World Health Organisation, the world’s population is ageing faster than ever before with more than 1 billion people aged 60 years or older in 2021. Yet ageing is more than simply getting older, it is a hugely complex process with genetic, environmental, and socioeconomic drivers that is still relatively poorly understood. Whilst not yet a “disease”, age-related conditions and multi-morbidities are the leading course of death worldwide [2] and the UK Spine Knowledge Exchange (https://www.kespine.org.uk/), a collaboration between the University of Oxford, the University of Birmingham, the University of Dundee, the Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC), and the Francis Crick Institute, was set up to improve health in old age by accelerating the development of new therapeutics to reduce the impact of age-related diseases.
As part of this collaboration, the MDC created an online resource that aims to improve ageing pharmaceutical productivity by allowing early elimination of drugs (or drug combinations) that would be inappropriate for realistic translation to the patient population for ageing interventions by assembling, analysing, and classifying drug relevant data to create a live dashboard: Dr-EAM.ai. This interactive tool (https://www.dr-eam.ai/) aims to also assist clinical specialists prescribe and assess drugs and drug combinations for the elderly population based on the application of a wide range of filters including efficacy, toxicity, drug-drug interactions, dosing, and administration route.
1. https://www.who.int/initiatives/decade-of-healthy-ageing
2. https://www.kespine.org.uk/sites/www.kespine.org.uk/files/attachments/A%20roadmap%20for%20the%20discovery%20of%20therapeutics%20in%20healthy%20ageing.pdf
‡ ≤ Former MDC Employees
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