Drug Repurposing in Future Drug Discovery and Development
Kirti Agrawal, Malavika Saji, Dhruv Kumar · Apple Academic Press eBooks · 2023
Rising necessity of potential drugs for treating chronic, rare, and untreated diseases is the main motive for the development of repurposed drugs. Drug repurposing or repositioning is the technique of discovering novel therapeutic uses for drugs, either already approved or under investigation for a new indication. This method has many advantages over the conventional methods of drug discovery. Reduced risk of failure is one factor that makes drug repurposing an approachable option. The number of drugs that fail in Phase III of clinical trials is disturbing, and only very few are approved for clinical use. Since repositioned drugs are already proven safe, they have less chance of failure, saving 5–7 years of safety testing. De novo drug discovery and development is a time-taken and high investment process while drug repurposing process is efficient and economical. There are generally four types of drug repurposing approaches: computational, knowledge-based, biological-experimental, and mixed approaches, which are broadly used in repurposed drug development. In this chapter, we have further elaborated traditional and high-throughput drug repurposing approaches and emphasized over their features, their validation techniques, noteworthy applications for treating a wide range of untreated diseases, and challenges of drug repositioning.