Applied Research
Studies of medication effectiveness and safety using large‑scale data

Drug Repurposing

Developing new medications is a risky, costly, and time-consuming process. My work uses large-scale databases from routine clinical care to identify new indications for existing drugs and uncover potential mechanisms of action across diseases.

I'm particularly excited about opportunities to repurpose existing drugs for neurodegenerative diseases, both to identify potential treatments and to generate insights that can guide the development of future therapies.

  • Lithium for Alzheimer's Disease and related dementias (medRxiv)

  • Drug repurposing for coronaviruses (SARS-CoV-1/2, MERS-CoV) (Science)

  • Dexamethasone and systemic corticosteroids for COVID-19 (JAMA)

  • IL-6 versus JAK inhibitors for severe COVID-19 (Epidemiology)

  • Renin-Angiotensin-Aldosterone-System inhibitors for COVID-19 (medRxiv)

  • Durability of the Single-Dose Ad26.COV2.S Vaccine (JAMA Open)

RCTs can establish efficacy under controlled conditions, but their results may not fully reflect how treatments perform in routine care. Our applied work studies comparative effectiveness using real-world data to guide post-approval decisions about which treatments work best, for whom, and in which settings.

Publications

Comparative Effectiveness

Andrew Weckstein

aweckstein@g.harvard.edu

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