Drug Repurposing in Biomedical Research:

Benefits and Challenges

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Aashish Sharma and Jagdeep Kaur

Abstract

Drug repurposing is establishment of new medical uses for already known drugs.

This is the new trends/options to combat the difficult diseases with already

existing drugs as the development of new drugs is lengthy and cost-effective

process. The unexpected success paved way to support repurposing of existing

experimental, approved, discontinued, or shelved drugs for several diseases. This

article provides a brief synopsis about repurposing and particularly evokes its

most recent scientific basis used to render it more efficient.

Keywords

Drug repurposing · Itraconazole · Digoxin · Nitroxoline · RNA viruses · DNA

viruses

3.1

Introduction

The repositioning of an active pharmaceutical ingredient that is already available in

the market for a new indication is referred to as drug repurposing. Albeit a number of

drawbacks and challenges associated with this strategy, it still possesses many

advantages, which include overcoming the abrasion currently associated with the

field of drug discovery (Pushpakom et al., 2018). Several repositioned drugs,

including some very old drugs, have been used throughout the course of medicine

historically. This repositioning of drugs was purely through serendipity in those

times. In the present scenario, novel methods based on data mining have been

A. Sharma · J. Kaur (*)

Department of Biotechnology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India

e-mail: jagsekhon@yahoo.com

# The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte

Ltd. 2022

R. C. Sobti, N. S. Dhalla (eds.), Biomedical Translational Research,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9232-1_3

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