KEY MESSAGES

●Governments in the US, UK and EU have recently established seven drug-repurposing programmes that aim to overcome legal and regulatory hurdles.

●The programmes all operate in different ways, presenting a variety of opportunities for all organisations in drug development, including charities and academics.

●Perhaps more profoundly, at least three of the programmes also constitute new models of drug development, relying less on patents and private industry and more on government involvement and clinical trials run by the public sector.

●These new models could lead to relatively fast, inexpensive therapies. Yet, how effective the programmes will be and how they could be improved is uncertain, and the comparison in this paper paves the way to address these essential issues.