Computational Methods for Drug

Repurposing

4

Sailu Yellaboina and Seyed E. Hasnain

Abstract

Drug repurposing also called drug repositioning or therapeutic switching refers to

finding new uses to existing drugs. This method offers an economically efficient

pipeline to identify new indications for existing drugs. The candidates for

repurposing are essentially marketed drugs or drugs that have been discontinued

in clinical trials for reasons other than safety concerns. To date, repurposed drugs

have been the consequence of serendipitous observations. However, recent

advances in sequencing and high-throughput technologies lead to the generation

of enormous amounts of genomic data such as transcriptomics, proteomics and

genetic variation leading to paradigm shift in the drug discovery process. Cur-

rently, there are a large number of candidate disease genes identified through

genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and other approaches. Also, there is a

growing amount of data on FDA-approved drugs to treat the disease and several

other drugs which are not toxic to humans but failed to treat the diseases. In silico

approaches for analyzing and integrating large-scale genomic datasets have been

incorporated in the drug repurposing methodologies. Here, we focus on describ-

ing existing genomic datasets and computational methods for drug repurposing.

S. Yellaboina (*)

Department of Biochemistry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences Bibinagar, Hyderabad,

Telangana, India

e-mail: bio.sailu@gmail.com

S. E. Hasnain

National Science Chair, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, India

Sharda University, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India

e-mail: seyedhasnain@gmail.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_4

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