On May 12, 2020, the Broad Institute’s Drug Repurposing Hub announced that it had opened its repository of nearly 7,000 drug compounds to help scientists discover COVID-19 treatments. Scientists, including those at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, began testing existing drugs that are already proven safe in humans, to see whether they can be repurposed to treat COVID-19 patients.

The Broad’s Center for the Development of Therapeutics (CDoT) is a part of this effort. It is making copies of its Drug Repurposing Hub — a collection of nearly 7,000 compounds that are either FDA-approved or proven safe in clinical trials — and sharing them with collaborators in Boston and around the world to help them hunt for existing compounds that might prove effective against COVID-19.

Drug repurposing works. The FDA recently granted emergency use authorization for a drug called remdesivir for COVID-19. The compound was originally developed for hepatitis C and was tested in humans in 2015 and 2016 as a possible treatment for Ebola before showing benefits for COVID-19 patients. (The Drug Repurposing Hub was not involved in this effort.)