Skip to main content

Teaching an Old Drug New Tricks

Biotech companies hope to turn the practice of finding novel uses for existing compounds into big business.

Written byMegan Scudellari
| 6 min read

Register for free to listen to this article
Listen with Speechify
0:00
6:00

FACTORIA SINGULAR / ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

Andreas and Aris Persidis love to tackle big problems. As graduate students in the 1980s, the two brothers—a naval architect and a biochemist, respectively—would spend long nights knocking around ideas for how to engineer a better propeller or a sleeker keel, tangible challenges involving multiple factors and many data points.

A decade later, the brothers turned their sights toward the big problems of a new discipline, one where data were beginning to pile up. “We thought, ‘Why don’t we use engineering theories and techniques to attempt to address some of the unbelievably complicated questions in biomedicine?’” recalls Aris Persidis. “Someone had to do something like this, so we decided to give it a go.”

In 1996 the Persidis brothers cofounded Biovista, a biotech based in ...

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of

The Scientist Logo
Receive full access to more than 35 years of archives, as well as TS Digest, digital editions of The Scientist, feature stories, and much more!
Already a member?
Add The Scientist as a preferred source on Google

Add The Scientist as a preferred Google source to see more of our trusted coverage.

Meet the Author

Related articles background image
August 2026 Digest cover
August 2026

Epic Fail: Sea-Monkeys Sabotage Fieldwork

When Barry Hicks set out to photograph thrombolites, thousands of unexpected visitors photobombed his underwater images.

View this Issue
Advancing Respiratory Immunity Through Tissue-Resident Memory T Cell Research

Advancing Respiratory Immunity Through Tissue-Resident Memory T Cell Research

Miltenyi
Overcoming Immunotherapy Resistance in Liver Cancer

Overcoming Immunotherapy Resistance in Liver Cancer

Axion Biosystems
Optimizing NGS Library Preparation for Reliable Sequencing Data

Optimizing NGS Library Preparation for Reliable Sequencing Data

Covaris
Using TCR Repertoire Sequencing to Advance Immunology Research

Using TCR Repertoire Sequencing to Advance Immunology Research

Miltenyi

Products

Sino Biological Logo

Sino Biological Launches SuperNuclease ® Pro with Free Trial Program

Sino Biological Logo

Sino Biological Launches Precisely Characterized Full-Length p-Tau217 Protein to Advance Next-Generation Alzheimer’s Biomarker Assay Development

A photo of a scientist placing the Resipher device on a 96-well plate.

Resipher: Continuous Live-Cell Mitochondrial Respiration Monitoring in 96-Well Plates

Lucid Scientific logo
Conceptual image of ice and frost.

The VAULT100 PRO: Inside the most advanced Stirling Ultracold ULT freezer ever built.

Stirling Ultracold logo