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New episode of HARD DRUGS! GLP1 drugs have transformed obesity & diabetes, help treat heart disease, kidney disease and sleep apnea. They're far from the only drug with multiple uses. But sometimes, it takes several decades - and public funding - to learn about new uses.

Why? The commercial incentive to test further is time-limited: once a drug goes off-patent and generics can enter, companies can get undercut by generics, so it’s no longer worth it to run expensive clinical trials to test other uses.

The problem is even worse for tropical diseases, which are often not profitable to treat in the first place. The result is that we’re missing out on knowing about a lot of additional uses of already-approved drugs! There may be more miracle drugs hiding in plain sight.

Economists estimate the ‘missing innovation’ would be worth 100 to 400 billion dollars in social value annually(!) How do we solve this?