European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

AN ANALYTIC REVIEW ON DRUG REPURPOSING: DISCOVERING NEW INDICATIONS FOR OLD DRUGS- THE BENEFITS AND LIMITATIONS.

*Sai Laxmi, MD. Parveen and Padma Bairi

ABSTRACT

Introduction: The concept of repurposing of drugs, started long back serendipitously, began to gather pace in 1990s, is now rapidly emerging as an alternative to denovo drug discovery and paved the way for today‟s scientific drug repurposing. Repurposing is simply recycling an old drug for a therapeutic purpose that is significantly different from the originally intended one. Currently there are 7000 diseases with no effective treatments affecting 500 million people for which only 10-15 new treatments are available per year which is too few and too expensive the reason being a high cost involved in denovo drug discovery. Therefore many academia and industry are investing in this largely untapped area of drug repurposing. Many success stories run from Arsenic, the oldest drug of the world, used in early 1900s to the disaster drug thalidomide to recent Duloxetin repurposed in 2010 and many ongoing projects and clinical trials are on the way to success. Many active organisations, institutions and collaborations are taking place in recent 5-6years to support and adopt repurposing. The barriers and challenges like problems of marketing, current payment system, patent problems, and post market surveillance risks, among others can be overcome by measures described in the review benefitting industry as well as patients. In this review we discuss the pros and cons of drug repurposing while detailing the various tools and methods of drug repurposing, drugs repurposed so far, along with the drugs with future repurposing possibilities.

Keywords: Reprofiling, repositioning, rescue, repurposing, drug.