FDA launches CURE ID app for healthcare providers

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration launched CURE ID, an online repository that allows the clinical community to report their experiences treating infectious diseases.

CURE ID – which can be accessed via smartphone or other mobile devices – is a platform that enables the crowdsourcing of medical information from health care providers. It was developed by the FDA and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“The CURE ID application focuses on drugs for infectious diseases lacking adequate treatments, including neglected tropical diseases, emerging infectious threats, and infections caused by antimicrobial-resistant organisms. When health care professionals directly input their clinical cases into the app, CURE ID allows these real-world experiences to be organized and analyzed much faster, making it easier to spot promising new uses for existing drugs,” Amy Abernethy, FDA principal deputy commissioner, said. “Our hope is that this app will serve as a connector among major treatment centers, academics, private practitioners, government facilities, and other health care professionals from around the world and ultimately get treatments to patients faster.”

The platform will help identify drug candidates for additional study and serve as a resource for practitioners making individual patient treatment decisions in the absence of established safe and effective options.

“The potential importance of new therapeutic opportunities from repurposing drugs can’t be understated,” NCATS Director Christopher Austin said. “The CURE ID platform exemplifies how collaborative efforts can spark innovations that benefit patients. This new platform harnesses the power of crowdsourcing to help gather medical observations in the field and help identify potentially effective treatments for diseases.”

The app works by collecting a case report form from caregivers about their experience using an approved product for an unapproved use. Health care professionals can browse from a collection of cases that have already been documented, including successful and unsuccessful treatments. The app includes a newsfeed, an improved search feature with data from 325 different infectious diseases and syndromes to choose from, and the inclusion of nearly 1,500 initial cases from clinicians and the published literature and over 18,000 clinical trials.