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Toward better drug repositioning: prioritizing and integrating existing methods into efficient pipelines

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drudis.2013.11.005Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Understanding the existing drug repositioning methods with a top-down flowchart.

  • Prioritizing repositioning methods using their integrated knowledge and information.

  • A general drug-repositioning pipeline with a fishbone flowchart.

  • Guidance for customizing and generating new drug-repositioning pipelines.

Recycling old drugs, rescuing shelved drugs and extending patents’ lives make drug repositioning an attractive form of drug discovery. Drug repositioning accounts for approximately 30% of the newly US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs and vaccines in recent years. The prevalence of drug-repositioning studies has resulted in a variety of innovative computational methods for the identification of new opportunities for the use of old drugs. Questions often arise from customizing or optimizing these methods into efficient drug-repositioning pipelines for alternative applications. It requires a comprehensive understanding of the available methods gained by evaluating both biological and pharmaceutical knowledge and the elucidated mechanism-of-action of drugs. Here, we provide guidance for prioritizing and integrating drug-repositioning methods for specific drug-repositioning pipelines.

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