Parvesh Paul, MBBS, MD

Orise Fellow
NCATS/NIH

Disclosure: I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.

Parvesh Paul
MBBS MD
ORISE Fellow
NCATS-NIH
We all have our reasons to choose the path that we tread upon. I am a physician by training and my “reasons” brought me to work as a fellow with the FDA-NCATS team in developing the CURE ID mobile application and website which captures “drug repurposing” efforts in infectious diseases. My fascination with the concept of drug repurposing began ten years back, when as a young physician, I first started to manage cases of XDR-TB in a remote clinic in the foothills of Himalayas. The question I was grappling with – “what do you do when there are no antibiotics left in your arsenal that can be used against pan-resistant bacteria?”. Later, as I worked through my residency, I realized the gravity of the whole situation as I came across MDR and pan-resistant gram negative bacterias in my wards and ICU and the fact that drug development in the infectious disease landscape is mostly stagnant. Could drug repurposing be one option to deal with this self-made menace?
The current pandemic has brought great attention to both the opportunity presented by drug repurposing, as well as many of its challenges. Our mobile application and website provides a unique platform for physicians to share their clinical experiences with "difficult to treat infections", serve as a rapid communication platform and most importantly, serve as a hypothesis generating tool which may help identify drug candidates for novel uses against various infectious diseases.