Every time an organism reproduces, its DNA changes a little bit; this is called a mutation. Sometimes mutations are productive—they can make us run faster or process food more efficiently—and other times they can be life-threatening genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis.

For organisms that reproduce very rapidly, these changes can be profound. Bacteria and viruses can replicate in under an hour, making mutations commonplace. Of the many mutations in a population, there’s almost always at least one that makes the population better at surviving it's current conditions.
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Evolving organisms are moving targets, making them much harder to treat compared to diseases like diabetes. Bacteria evolve resistance exponentially, but the current therapeutic pipeline is largely linear. On average, it takes $1.5 - 3 billion and 10-15 years to develop and approve a new drug, nowhere near quickly enough to respond to pandemics and emerging pathogens.

Many pharmaceutical companies have moved away from drug discovery for infectious diseases because the tedious, time-consuming process has low return on investment due to evolution of drug-resistance.

The COVID-19 crisis highlights all of these challenges. Our current drug development pipelines are not prepared to respond to pandemics. It is not possible to catch up to microbial evolution without novel and inovative approaches.

ARC Labs develops a framework for sustainable innovation to create and nurture an ecosystem of rapidly-developing promising technologies for global health.

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ARC Labs is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. We’re not focused on turning a personal profit; we’re here to disrupt an archaic drug discovery pipeline to make medicine more accessible for all.

We focus on the strengths of the existing pillars of drug research and discovery: academia and industry. There exists so much untapped expertise and potential at the academic level, especially in early stage drug discovery. The pharmaceutical industry, on the other hand, coordinates massive amounts of funding for clinical trials and scale-up of successful technologies.

ARC Labs bridges these two presently isolated spheres of  research to bring medicine and treatments to patients who need them.

Our specialized team takes care of the networking, establishing a consortium of scientists at all points along a traditional drug discovery pipeline. When your resources and funding bring your development to a standstill, we identify another lab to pick up where you left off, ensuring revolutionary technologies don’t get left in the dust.

Successful platforms spin out of ARC Labs’ incubation process to form start-ups. ARC Labs takes small fraction of the income for these start-ups to remain self-sustainable as a non-profit organization.