I'm hopeful that maybe those people could potentially have their lives saved in their

disease halted, with a treatment that hopefully is already, out there, already FDA approved.

As you might imagine, it often takes years to develop a safe and effective drug, then

get it FDA approved, manufacture it, and get it out to the public.

But when it comes to this COVID-19 response, if we know anything, it is that time is of

the essence.

There is a desperate need to treat severely ill people and also prevent infected people

from becoming very sick.

So early on in the pandemic, medical professionals started looking at new ways of using old drugs.

It's called drug repurposing.

The advantage of drug repurposing is that that drug has already approved, it's already

gone through the regulatory process to show that it's safe and effective or something.

That's Dr. David Faganbaum.

He's an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

He's also one of the medical professionals working to find existing drugs to repurpose.

So if you can find additional uses for that drug, you already know there's a good safety

profile that just a matter of matching the right drug to the right disease.

It's a fascinating topic.

And so today, I sat down with Dr. Faganbaum to talk about the advantages of drug repurposing

and the challenges that are also involved.

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

I'm the C&N's chief medical correspondent.

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