Review of Drug Repositioning Approaches and Resources

Abstract

Drug discovery is a time-consuming, high-investment, and high-risk process in traditional drug development. Drug repositioning has become a popular strategy in recent years. Different from traditional drug development strategies, the strategy is efficient, economical and riskless. There are usually three kinds of approaches: computational approaches, biological experimental approaches, and mixed approaches, all of which are widely used in drug repositioning. In this paper, we reviewed computational approaches and highlighted their characteristics to provide references for researchers to develop more powerful approaches. At the same time, the important findings obtained using these approaches are listed. Furthermore, we summarized 76 important resources about drug repositioning. Finally, challenges and opportunities in drug repositioning are discussed from multiple perspectives, including technology, commercial models, patents and investment.

Figure 1

The investment in drug development by PhRMA member companies and the number of approved drugs by the FDA from 1995 to 2015.

Figure 2

The contrast of traditional drug development and drug repositioning. A) Flowchart of the traditional drug development process. B) Flowchart of drug repositioning.

Figure 2

The contrast of traditional drug development and drug repositioning. A) Flowchart of the traditional drug development process. B) Flowchart of drug repositioning.

Figure 3

Risk and reward in two different drug development strategies

Figure 4

The workflow of text mining.

Figure 5

The workflow of a semantic network inference.