Accelerating Drug Development: The Promise of Repurposing

Because it entails the use of de-risked compounds and may result in reduced total development costs and shorter development timeframes, repurposing "old" medications to treat common and uncommon diseases is increasingly becoming an appealing prospect given the high attrition rates, significant costs, and sluggish pace of new drug discovery and development. Finding repurposable medication candidates has been approached in a number of data-driven and experimental ways, but there are significant technological and regulatory obstacles that must be overcome. In order to rationally discover or identify new uses for pharmacological molecules, drug repositioning combines the efforts of activity-based or experimental and in silico-based or computational methodologies. Therefore, it is thought to be a new approach in which medications that have previously been shown safe for use in humans are redirected based on a legitimate target molecule to cure diseases, especially those that are uncommon, challenging to treat, or ignored. In this review, we outline strategies for medication repurposing, sometimes referred to as drug repositioning, talk about the difficulties the purposing community faces, and suggest creative solutions to these difficulties in order to help achieve the full potential of drug repurposing.