Drug repurposing: new tricks for old drugs

Authors Keywords: drug repurposing, drug repositioning, drug reprofiling, therapeutic switching, approaches to drug repurposing Abstract

Drugs that have been used for indications other than their originally intended purpose date back to at least the 1950s,1 with some authors proposing that the earliest examples date as far back as over a century ago.2 Despite this, the first formal definition of drug repurposing only appeared in the literature in 2004.3 Many definitions now exist, which explain drug repurposing as a “novel way of finding new uses outside the scope of the original indication for existing drugs”.1 Also known in the literature as “drug repositioning, drug reprofiling, drug retasking”2,4,5 or “therapeutic switching”,4 this process has been popularised because of the many advantages it has over de novo drug production, in an age where time is money.

Author Biography M Gayaparsad, University of the Witwatersrand

Department of Anaesthesia, School of Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences, Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

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