ChEMBL

There is a great paper in Drug Discovery Today: Therapeutic Strategies reviewing experience in a large number of drug repurposing experiments performed at one institute - the University of New Mexico. There is a lot of interest in the potential of drug repurposing, many papers discussing various theoretical approaches, discussion of IP, etc, but relatively few present real-world, worked examples. The well-known examples tend to be the successful ones, and have now become almost cliches - Sildenafil and Thalidomide for example. Discussion of the challenges encountered is far less common, and this paper covers a portfolio of projects, identified by a mix of empirical broad screening, virtual screening, or hypothesis-led research - a summary of each of them w.r.t. their status and progress is then outlined - finally some conclusions are presented - the most valuable and sobering ones being the limiting factors.

A further feature of the paper is the sheer complexity (and cost) of this sort of work if tackled seriously with a genuine translational science approach, as opposed to a list of hits from an in vitro/virtual screen, that are proposed for testing.

For those of you dying to know the 'punchlines' on the current challenges (as one might expect, data availability is a major component behind all of these), these are:

• Dosing and safety
• Lack of integration with pharmaceutical sciences and toxicology
• Appropriate intellectual property coverage

%T Drug repurposing from an academic perspective
%J Drug Discovery Today: Therapeutic Strategies
%A T.I. Oprea
%A J.E. Bauman
%A C.G. Bologa
%A T. Buranda
%A A. Chigaev
%A B.S. Edwards 
%A J.W. Jarvik
%A H.D. Gresham
%A M.K. Haynes 
%A B. Hjelle 
%A R. Hromas
%A L. Hudson
%A D.A. Mackenzie
%A C.Y. Muller
%A J.C. Reed
%A P.C. Simons
%A Y. Smagley
%A J. Strouse
%A Z. Surviladze
%A T. Thompson
%A O. Ursu 
%A A. Waller
%A A. Wandinger-Ness
%A S.S. Winter
%A Y. Wu
%A S.M. Young
%A R.S. Larson
%A C. Willman
%A L.A. Sklar
%O doi:10.1016/j.ddstr.2011.10.002