Abandoned. By the Side of the Road. In the Rain

The US National Institutes of Health has made a deal with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly to share "abandoned experimental drugs" with academic researchers, reports ScienceInsider's Jocelyn Kaiser. The hope, Kaiser says, is that researchers will be able to find new uses for the drugs. The companies will grant access to two dozen compounds that have passed safety studies, but were deemed ineffective for a specific purpose. "Often tens of millions of dollars and years of research have gone into these compounds, so they are already well along the drug development pipeline," Kaiser says. "The government program will allow academics to 'crowdsource' ways to use them." This program will be the first initiative of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, which plans to use $20 million of its requested $575 million 2013 budget to fund the grants.