Drug Repurposing; A Cumulative Study On A Multi-Faceted Alternative To De Novo Synthesis
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Abstract
Challenges faced by the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to treating various diseases are ever growing. There is a need to find out alternatives to supplement the growth of research and development segment in a cost-effective manner in order to increase the pace of delivery of medications to patients in need. One of these ways is drug repurposing which essentially is an approach to find new therapeutic uses of a drug than the one it was originally used for. This approach circumvents various safety and toxicity trials that generally take up a lot of time when it comes to development since the data is already available.
Various approaches towards drug repurposing are already available or are under development. This review covers various approaches towards drug repurposing while delving deeper into 5 major drug categories and examples of few drugs along with rare diseases and drugs repurposed for them. We have also emphasized on the prospect of drug repurposing approach in the coming years while taking a look at the past when it comes to various drugs that were initially used for certain indications but were later repurposed to provide therapeutic value for indications that were different from the original ones.