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Review
. 2021 Mar 22;22(2):1656-1678.
doi: 10.1093/bib/bbaa003.

Exploration of databases and methods supporting drug repurposing: a comprehensive survey

Ziaurrehman Tanoli  1 , Umair Seemab  2 , Andreas Scherer  1 , Krister Wennerberg  3 , Jing Tang  4 , Markus Vähä-Koskela  1
Affiliations
Review

Exploration of databases and methods supporting drug repurposing: a comprehensive survey

Ziaurrehman Tanoli et al. Brief Bioinform. .

Abstract

Drug development involves a deep understanding of the mechanisms of action and possible side effects of each drug, and sometimes results in the identification of new and unexpected uses for drugs, termed as drug repurposing. Both in case of serendipitous observations and systematic mechanistic explorations, confirmation of new indications for a drug requires hypothesis building around relevant drug-related data, such as molecular targets involved, and patient and cellular responses. These datasets are available in public repositories, but apart from sifting through the sheer amount of data imposing computational bottleneck, a major challenge is the difficulty in selecting which databases to use from an increasingly large number of available databases. The database selection is made harder by the lack of an overview of the types of data offered in each database. In order to alleviate these problems and to guide the end user through the drug repurposing efforts, we provide here a survey of 102 of the most promising and drug-relevant databases reported to date. We summarize the target coverage and types of data available in each database and provide several examples of how multi-database exploration can facilitate drug repurposing.

Keywords: biomolecular databases; disease databases; drug databases; drug repositioning; drug–target interaction databases.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Drug repositioning databases categorized into more than one subcategory. Some subcategories are shown more than once in order to facilitate the interpretation of database relationships.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Disease-based drug repurposing workflow using databases listed in Tables 1–4. Databases are mentioned inside brackets. Dark font shows recommended databases and normal font shows alternative databases. The workflow describes steps for disease-based computational drug repurposing for AML; however, the same sequence of steps and the listed databases can be used for other diseases.
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