Béla Bihari, Balázs-Attila Orbán and Aranka Ravai-Nagy are part of the team at Egnosis, the Romanian IT company leading the development of the REPO4EU platform. Bringing together expertise in software engineering, business strategy and user experience design, they are responsible for transforming the project’s scientific vision into a digital ecosystem that supports the entire drug repurposing journey, from data exploration and decision support to collaboration and innovation.
Over the past three years, the Egnosis team has worked closely with researchers, clinicians and industry partners across the REPO4EU consortium to build a one-stop-shop platform for precision drug repurposing. In this interview, Béla, Balázs and Aranka discuss the collaborative process behind the platform’s development, the challenges of designing for a multidisciplinary scientific community, and their vision for a digital workspace that could help accelerate the future of drug repurposing in Europe and beyond.
From initial development to final delivery: Meet the team embarked on a 7-year journey
Can you tell us a bit about your backgrounds and your roles within REPO4EU?
Béla: My background is rooted in software engineering. I started my career as a developer in Munich, Germany, and gradually moved towards more strategic and leadership roles, particularly in collaborative and multidisciplinary environments. Today, I serve as General Manager of Egnosis, where I focus on bridging technology, innovation and real-world impact through large-scale European research initiatives.
Within REPO4EU, Egnosis leads the technological development of the platform. Our goal is to create a one-stop-shop digital infrastructure for precision drug repurposing. My role is to guide this vision strategically and operationally, ensuring that the platform truly supports researchers, clinicians and industry partners in transforming complex scientific knowledge into actionable insights.
Balázs: My background combines software engineering and economics, and over the past twenty-five years I have worked across many different sectors, from aviation and medical research to flower cultivation. While these industries may seem unrelated, I have found that the core challenge is always the same: understanding how people work and designing systems that help them work better.
In REPO4EU, I act as the interface between the consortium and the development team. My job is to translate scientific outputs into technical requirements, track the different resources and tools being developed across the project, and help shape the platform into a coherent and functional ecosystem.
Aranka: I am the UX/UI designer behind the platform. Although I am relatively new to scientific research, I bring more than fifteen years of experience working on industrial and commercial projects with international companies. My background is in design, where curiosity and openness to change have always guided my work. For me, research has always been part of the design process — not necessarily in a scientific sense, but in an experimental, human-centred and creative way. Building this platform has been a fascinating opportunity to connect those two worlds.
The development of the REPO4EU Platform began in 2023. What have been the main milestones so far?
Béla: The platform did not happen overnight. It is the result of a carefully structured, multi-year effort aligned with REPO4EU’s mission to create a sustainable ecosystem for drug repurposing.
The journey started in 2023 with concept definition, requirements gathering and extensive collaboration with consortium partners to understand real-world workflows and needs. In 2024, we moved into the design and architecture phase, focusing on scalability, interoperability and secure data handling.
The year 2025 marked a major milestone as we transitioned into full implementation and introduced the first alpha version of the platform. This initial release includes the core data hub, early AI integrations, curated databases and decision-support guides. We also unveiled the first version of the REPO AI Assistant, an intelligent assistant designed to guide users through their workflows.
Looking ahead, the beta version will be released in the autumn of 2026, with expanded bioinformatics tools, more advanced AI-driven analytics and an upgraded AI assistant based on Agentic AI architectures. The final production-ready version is planned for 2027.
What it takes to bring the REPO4EU Platform to life
In these past 3 years, what has Egnosis been working on behind the scenes?
Balázs: It has been a long and challenging process. We began by meeting with every work package to understand their contributions and identify the different user roles within the platform.
Because the scientific domain is highly specialised, we worked closely with scientific consultants who helped bridge the gap between research terminology and technical implementation. We analysed each deliverable in detail, organised multiple discussions with consortium partners and gradually transformed scientific ideas into concrete requirements, user features, databases and tools.
Only once these requirements were well defined could we move on to technical architecture, user experience design and implementation.
User experience seems to have been a major focus throughout this early development stage. Why is this such an important element?
Aranka: In my case, designing the user experience for this platform has been a unique challenge.
Unlike many digital products aimed at broad audiences, our users are scientists, researchers and industry professionals with very specific expectations and deep expertise. Drug repurposing itself is an incredibly complex process involving many stakeholders and specialised areas of knowledge.
Our mission is therefore much bigger than simply designing a tool. We are creating a workplace for the people shaping the future of medicine. It needs to be clear, comprehensive, easy to navigate and flexible enough to evolve as new knowledge and new users join the platform.
As we approach the beta release, we are still testing, refining and learning. We have built a flexible design system from the ground up, working closely with experts across different disciplines who have guided us throughout the process.
From Alpha to Beta – a process of continuous development and improvement
What have been some of the biggest technical challenges you've encountered so far?
Balázs: I often compare our role to that of a car manufacturer. The consortium provides many different components—the databases, tools and scientific outputs—and our job is to place everything under one coherent structure and ensure that all the pieces work together seamlessly.
The biggest challenge was building a technical foundation that is secure, scalable and flexible enough to support every feature we envisioned. Before writing any code, we invested a great deal of time researching technical solutions and validating how different components could interact with one another.
Once the foundations were in place, it became a matter of hard work and constant communication.
The alpha version of the platform is now available, and soon we'll be launching the beta version. What can users expect if they were to log in today?
Béla: The alpha release was actually not part of the original plan. We introduced it for two reasons: first, to validate the platform technically ahead of the beta release; and second, to increase awareness and encourage early engagement with the REPO4EU ecosystem.
Users can already explore an extensive knowledge base covering different aspects of drug repurposing, browse decision-support guides, interact with our AI Assistant, access curated scientific databases and experiment with integrated tools.
These include REPOscope, a prior-art knowledge base tailored to drug repurposing patents, as well as SMART, a decision-analytic model for health technology assessment. Users can also explore matchmaking features designed to foster new collaborations across disciplines.
Looking ahead...
What is next in your list of priorities for the platform?
Balázs: There is still a long list of exciting developments ahead. The platform will continue expanding with new scientific databases, including cell and animal models, preclinical studies, reformulation providers and endophenotype catalogues.
Our knowledge base and decision-support guides will grow, while new tools for clinical statistics and patient stratification will become available.
Perhaps most importantly, we are working towards creating stronger connections across domains. We want to break down the silo effect that often characterises biomedical research and enable specialists from different backgrounds to collaborate more easily and effectively.
Béla: That is really our long-term vision: not simply building a platform, but creating a living ecosystem that evolves together with the scientific community.
We want the REPO4EU platform to become a place where technology, medicine and innovation come together to accelerate discoveries and ultimately improve patients’ lives.
REPO4EU: The Podcast
Our podcast brings listeners closer to the latest innovations, research and developments happening in drug repurposing across the globe. The first season, ‘Drug Repurposing Next-Gen’, spotlights the work of PhD researchers, post-docs and young investigators involved in REPO4EU, exploring their role in the project as well as their career journeys. New episodes will be released monthly. Stay tuned for the next one!