Old friends in new guise: repositioning of known drugs with structural bioinformatics

Abstract

Developing a drug de novo is a laborious and costly endeavor. Thus, the repositioning of already approved drugs for the treatment of new diseases is promising and valuable. One computational approach to repositioning exploits the structural similarity of binding sites of known and new targets. Here, we review computational methods to represent and align binding sites. We review available tools, present success stories and discuss limits of the approach.