Drug repositioning
Drug repositioning (also known as Drug repurposing, Drug re-profiling and Drug re-tasking) is the application of known drugs and compounds to new indications (i.e., diseases).
Drug repositioning has been growing in importance in the last few years as an increasing number of Drug Development and Pharmaceutical Companies see their drug pipelines drying up and realize that many previously promising technologies have failed to deliver ‘as advertised’.
Using Drug repositioning, big pharmaceutical companies have achieved a number of early successes, for example Pfizer’s Viagra in erectile dysfunction and Celgene’s thalidomide in severe erythema nodosum leprosum. However it is the smaller companies and academic groups that have risen to the challenge of performing drug repositioning on a systematic basis. These companies use a variety of approaches and technologies: for example Ore Phamaceuticals use a combination of approaches including In Vivo Imaging and In Silico Biology to assess a compound and develop and confirm hypotheses about which new diseases it may be used for.
A significant advantage of drug repositioning over traditional drug development is that since the repositioned drug has already passed a significant number of toxicity and other tests, it can bypass much of the early cost and time needed to bring a drug to market. On the other hand drug repositioning faces some challenges itself since the intellectual property issues surrounding the original drug may be complex and from a commercial point of view it may not always make sense to take such a drug to market.
Drug repositioning maximizes our use of existing knowledge and promises to evolve into a tool that compliments our efforts to cure diseases through the development of new chemical entities.
External links
- Biovista Inc. uses multi-dimensional drug and disease profile matching together with in-vivo tests to create and validate repositioning opportunities in very short time spans. Over 6000 drugs and over 7000 indications are correlated on the basis of their profiles, to provide ranked assessments of the suitability of a compound or a combination of compounds for a specific therapeutic area.
- Melior Discovery combines nearly 35 in vivo models in a way that allows scientists to test a molecule for its potential efficacy across a broad array of therapeutic areas