Recent Trends in Drug Repositioning for Discovery of New Anticancer Drugs

Abstract

Drug repositioning, the process of finding new uses of existing drugs, has been gaining popularity in recent years. The availability of several established clinical drug libraries and rapid advances in disease biology, genomics and bioinformatics has accelerated the pace of both activity-based and in silico drug repositioning. Drug repositioning has attracted particular attention from the communities engaged in anticancer drug discovery due to the combination of great demand for new anticancer drugs and the availability of a wide variety of cell- and target-based screening assays. With the successful clinical introduction of a number of noncancer drugs for cancer treatment, drug repositioning now became a powerful alternative strategy to discover and develop novel anticancer drug candidates from the existing drug space. In this review, recent successful examples of drug repositioning for anticancer drug discovery from noncancer drugs will be discussed.

Keywords: Drug repositioning, green fluorescent protein, fluorescence, pharmacokinetics (PK), pharmacodynamics (PD)