Bioinformatics Perspective of Drug Repurposing

Different diseases can be treated with various therapeutic agents. Drug discovery aims to find potential molecules for existing and emerging diseases. However, factors, such as increasing development cost, generic competition due to the patent expiry of several drugs, increase in conservative regulatory policies, and insufficient breakthrough innovations impairs the development of new drugs and the learning productivity of pharmaceutical industries. Drug repurposing is the process of finding new therapeutic applications for already approved, withdrawn from use, abandoned, and experimental drugs. Drug repurposing is another method that may partially overcome the hurdles related to drug discovery and hence appears to be a wise attempt. However, drug repurposing being not a standard regulatory process, leads to administrative concerns and problems. The drug repurposing also requires expensive, high-risk clinical trials to establish the safety and efficacy of the repurposed drug. Recent innovations in the field of bioinformatics can accelerate the new drug repurposing studies by identifying new targets of the existing drugs along with drug candidate screening and refinement. Recent advancements in the field of comprehensive high throughput data in genomics, epigenetics, chromosome architecture, transcriptomic, proteomics, and metabolomics may also contribute to the understanding of molecular mechanisms involved in drug-target interaction. The present review describes the current scenario in the field of drug repurposing along with the application of various bioinformatic tools for the identification of new targets for the existing drug.