Therapeutic Development / AI & LLM Community Call – Non-Profit Innovation: Repurposed Drugs Meet AI

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Non-profits are uniquely positioned to drive innovative, low-cost approaches to new treatment options. In this interactive talk, Dr. Laura Kleiman, founder of Reboot Rx, will share how her organization uses AI to identify new cancer treatments from existing generic drugs—making therapies more accessible and affordable. She’ll highlight real-world examples, including a prostate cancer project that analyzed data from 16,000 studies to uncover promising repurposed treatments. Dr. Kleiman will also discuss the regulatory and market challenges to drug repurposing—and outline a bold vision for how non-profits can help overcome them.

The presentation will conclude with a discussion on what HRA members can learn from Reboot Rx’s model, as well as a more general discussion around the use of AI in drug discovery and development.

Speaker:

Laura Kleiman, PhD; Founder & CEO, Reboot Rx

Laura’s career has focused on building collaborations across disciplines and sectors to expand treatment options for cancer patients. She was serving as the Scientific Research Director of the cBio Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute when her mom was diagnosed with a blood cancer called multiple myeloma. While searching for treatment options, she found studies on promising treatments for patients like her mom, but there wasn’t yet proof that the treatments were effective. It was upsetting to learn that no one was running the definitive clinical trials because the drugs are cheap generics being repurposed as cancer therapies, and pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t generate large profits. Laura quit her job to focus on addressing this market failure and launched Reboot Rx a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2020.

Laura has been featured in Forbes, the Boston Business Journal, Inside Philanthropy, and Life Science Leader, and recognized with awards from The Commonwealth Institute’s Extraordinary Women Advancing Healthcare, 40 Under 40 in Cancer, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center’s MassNextGen Initiative, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. She is a Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Entrepreneur and Henri Termeer Fellow. Laura earned a PhD in Computational and Systems Biology from MIT and was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.