Drug repositioning: Achievements, advancements and barriers

The humongous cost and long-time duration of new drug development surpasses the rewards in form benefit to patients and cost recovered by the pharmaceutical firms. The problem which this situation gives rise to are productivity gap, pressure by sky soaring prices, incompetency with respect to beneficial generics and issues from regulatory authorities. One advanced approach of drug development which shows potential to tackle these issues is what we refer to as drug repositioning. Drug repurposing is an economical option, time duration to bring a new drug to the market is lesser. There are different approaches to drug repositioning including two broad categories – data driven (computational approaches) and experimental approach. Data driven approaches include - signature matching, molecular docking, genetic mapping, pathway mapping, retrospective clinical analysis, novel data sources while the experimental approach include assays defining target drug interactions, phenotypic screening. Drug repositioning is associated with challenges like chances of failure, regulatory barriers, patency issues and lack of financial incentives. For maximizing the drug repositioning process and to increase its productivity challenges posed to drug repositioning need to be addressed.