PureTech uses AI to accelerate the initial steps of its process: identifying promising discontinued drugs and pinpointing what held them back. However, the crucial step of devising the scientific solution to fix the drug remains a human-driven, creative insight process, blending AI's scale with human ingenuity.

Shelved drugs aren't a monolith. They typically fall into four categories: 1) dropped due to a strategic shift, 2) orphaned after a biotech acquisition, 3) returned to a small company after a partnership ends, or 4) legally inaccessible after a company's bankruptcy. Understanding these archetypes is key to tailoring a rescue strategy.

Instead of relying on finding novel targets, a key strategy in neuropsychiatry is to revisit failed compounds that showed efficacy signals. Companies use modern chemistry and delivery to engineer solutions that separate efficacy from the historical liabilities that halted development, turning past failures into new opportunities.

A practical way to find potentially abandoned drug assets is to scan the public ClinicalTrials.gov database. Andrew Lo suggests identifying trials that are still listed as active but have not been updated for a significant period. This public data provides a scalable, low-cost starting point for discovering valuable candidates that pharma companies are no longer pursuing.

The company's drug discovery platform was built out of necessity to identify combination therapies for aging. Having proven its value internally, the strategic plan for the next 12-24 months includes making it commercially available through collaborations. This creates a new potential revenue stream and leverages an internal asset for external partnerships, diversifying the business model beyond its own pipeline.

Biotech companies create more value by focusing on de-risking molecules for clinical success, not engineering them from scratch. Specialized platforms can create molecules faster and more reliably, allowing developers to focus their core competency on advancing de-risked assets through the pipeline.

The value of a late-stage asset is not just its scientific promise. Acquirers and investors look for a clear definition of unmet medical need, a straightforward clinical development pathway, and a well-defined regulatory landscape to de-risk the path to market.

Discontinued drugs aren't hard to identify; the real challenge is navigating the out-licensing process inside a large pharma company. Without an internal champion to drive the complex approvals for a non-priority asset, promising drugs can languish on the shelf due to corporate inertia, not a desire to hide them.

R&D departments in large pharmaceutical companies often resist repurposing projects. Their leaders are rewarded for discovering new chemical entities, not for finding new applications for existing drugs, creating an internal funding barrier that business units must overcome.