New uses for old drugs

It takes too long and costs too much to bring new drugs to market. So let's beef up efforts to screen existing drugs for new uses, argue Curtis R. Chong and David J. Sullivan Jr. Drug rediscovery is becoming big business. It is so costly to bring a new drug to market that drug companies are looking at their back catalogues and patent expirations with a new eye. As Curtis R. Chong and David J. Sullivan Jr explain, the screening of existing drugs for new activities is a valuable short-cut between the lab and the clinic. And a comprehensive screening campaign could be particularly useful in uncovering treatments for neglected diseases.

[1]  F. Lombardo,et al.  Experimental and computational approaches to estimate solubility and permeability in drug discovery and development settings , 1997 .

[2]  W. Weber,et al.  Populations and genetic polymorphisms. , 1999, Molecular diagnosis : a journal devoted to the understanding of human disease through the clinical application of molecular biology.

[3]  J. Mason,et al.  The efficacy and safety of fexofenadine HCl and pseudoephedrine, alone and in combination, in seasonal allergic rhinitis. , 1999, The Journal of allergy and clinical immunology.

[4]  Johannes H. Voigt,et al.  Comparison of the NCI Open Database with Seven Large Chemical Structural Databases , 2001, J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci..

[5]  Shyam Sundar,et al.  Oral miltefosine for Indian visceral leishmaniasis. , 2002, The New England journal of medicine.

[6]  R. W. Hansen,et al.  The price of innovation: new estimates of drug development costs. , 2003, Journal of health economics.

[7]  T. Ashburn,et al.  Drug repositioning: identifying and developing new uses for existing drugs , 2004, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

[8]  P. Fisher,et al.  β-Lactam antibiotics offer neuroprotection by increasing glutamate transporter expression , 2005, Nature.

[9]  Fredric Cohen,et al.  Macro trends in pharmaceutical innovation , 2005, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

[10]  Mary Moran,et al.  A Breakthrough in R&D for Neglected Diseases: New Ways to Get the Drugs We Need , 2005, PLoS Medicine.

[11]  David S. Wishart,et al.  DrugBank: a comprehensive resource for in silico drug discovery and exploration , 2005, Nucleic Acids Res..

[12]  Jun O. Liu,et al.  A clinical drug library screen identifies astemizole as an antimalarial agent , 2006, Nature chemical biology.

[13]  R. Rosenfeld.  Nature , 2009, Otolaryngology--head and neck surgery : official journal of American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.