Drug Repurposing

Nowadays, with the continuous development and progress of science and technology, the research and development of new drugs still have many problems such as high loss, high cost and long research period. Therefore, the global pharmaceutical industry is still facing many challenges.

Drug repurposing is a research strategy which be used to identify new uses for approved or investigational drugs outside the scope of their initial medical indication. Compared with the development of a new drug, drug repurposing has many advantages. First, there is a lower risk of failure, and drugs that have been tested early have been shown to be safe enough in preclinical models and humans. Therefore, these compounds are less likely to fail due to safety issues in subsequent tests. Second, the drug development time is short, because most of the preclinical testing of the drug, safety assessment and a series of tests have been completed. Third, the investment required is low, and there may be substantial savings in preclinical and phase I and phase II costs for new drugs for the same indications. Finally and most importantly, drug repurposing may reveal new disease targets and pathways. Up to now, through the research strategy of drug repurposing, a variety of marketed drugs have been applied to new indications (Table 1).

Table 1. Drugs that have been approved for the market by drug repurposing
Pushpakom S, et al. Nat Rev Drug Discov. 2019 Jan;18(1):41-58.

MedChemExpress (MCE) drug repurposing compound libraries consists of a series of approved and post-clinical phase compounds. These compounds are suitable for high-throughput screening studies for new indications of drugs, because these compounds have completed preclinical or clinical studies and have good bioactivity, safety, and bioavailability. MedChemExpress (MCE) drug repurposing compound libraries contain more than 10 compound libraries based on different classification standards. All compounds have detailed indications, clinical information and approval institutions, which are easy to conduct later research.