>You would never know, to read a lot of Ramaswamy’s press coverage (here’s a recent profile from TechCrunch) that the Axovant drug works through a mechanism that has failed twice in Alzheimer’s clinical trials so far.
>You wouldn’t know from such articles, though, that there have been (and are) other companies which have been formed around the idea of taking pharma cast-offs and getting them through the clinic (larger companies already try to monetize what they can in their portfolio by partnering or outlicensing, of course). The Medicines Company is one such dealmaker, acquiring and partnering late-stage compounds and trying to get them approved. Outside of the for-profit business model, there are a number of initiatives trying to repurpose or revive older compounds for new diseases.No one so far has been able to take over the world doing this. There are not, unfortunately, many big piles of such candidates sitting around. Most of the shelved compounds were shelved because (a) they did not work, and/or (b) they showed toxicity. You’re going to have to figure a way around those problems before you go back into humans, and that’s not easy. There are a few drugs that have been dropped for business reasons, or were lost or mishandled during a merger or the like, but I don’t think that there are enough of those to make a Ramaswamy drug empire.