Drug Repurposing in Quest for Newer Therapeutic Options Against Cancer
Sohini Chakraborty, Sarbajit Ray, Satarupa Banerjee · Apple Academic Press eBooks · 2024
Drug repurposing, also known as drug redirecting, is a novel approach to reuse and explore an approved, failed, or abandoned drug and redirecting it toward a new therapeutic application in the same or another morbidity. Reducing cost and time frame of drug discovery leads to the concept of repurposing an existing drug against the increasing number of common and rare diseases is a newer popular alternative. Repurposing of drugs has drastically reduced the jeopardy regarding the development of orphan drugs, and similarly, the orphan drugs may also be reused for some other common disease. For example, Aspirin which is commonly used as an analgesic, has recently been repurposed against colorectal cancer. Drugs, when repositioned, often increase their therapeutic efficacy, show a better safety profile and considerably mitigates adverse events. The drug is repurposed initially by multi-omics approaches like high-throughput and/or high-content screening of probable candidates against a certain plausible molecular target biomarker of interests followed by molecular docking, profile-based drug repurposing, network-based drug repurposing, etc. Further, the experimental validation of the repurposed drug is performed by in vitro studies using cell lines, as well as in vivo studies using xenograft and knockout models. Artificial intelligence, various machine learning, and deep learning algorithms efficiently escalate repurposing. Hence, a wide array of computational methodologies combined with experimental procedures are utilized for drug repurposing. Cancer counts as one of the deadliest diseases around the globe, as each year, millions of people are diagnosed with it. The currently approved chemotherapy options are often cytotoxic, and therefore, newer druggable options are still needed to be discovered. This chapter reviews the various computational and experimental approaches used for drug repurposing in cancer, selection of candidate drugs and other newer strategies for better management of the deadly disease.