Genomic Approaches for Drug

Repositioning

5

Isra Ahmad Farouk, Zheng Yao Low, Ashwini Puniyamurti,

Nur Zawanah Zabidi, Mohammad Khusni Ahmat Amin,

and Sunil Kumar Lal

Abstract

Drug treatments of certain diseases that are either rare, complex, or novel may not

always be available due to high cost of drug development and research. Drug

repositioning (DR) is an alternative approach to usurp already available drugs or

drug candidates with FDA approval, which have been initially developed for

specific diseases and re-establish their use for other diseases. Modern genomic

methods for drug repositioning involve the usage of computational programs and

online tools to analyse and ultimately deduce targets with high specificity to be

considered as candidates for repositioning. Gene, protein, disease, and drug

databases are built from high-throughput experimental, in vitro, in vivo, and

clinical data, thus providing a reliable basis for drug target acquisition purposes.

Key experimental and in silico approaches for modern drug repositioning,

namely, signature matching, molecular docking, genome-wide association stud-

ies, and network-based approaches aided by artificial intelligence will be

described in this chapter along with research examples that have used these

methods. Drug repositioning for certain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease,

cystic fibrosis, and SARS-CoV-2 disease, will be discussed in this chapter.

Lastly, we will discuss the challenges faced and the future perspectives of

DR. Genomic computational approaches for drug repositioning presents much

potential in identifying drug targets more efficiently and effectively, which

I. A. Farouk · Z. Y. Low · A. Puniyamurti · N. Z. Zabidi · M. K. A. Amin

School of Science, Monash University, Selangor, Malaysia

S. K. Lal (*)

School of Science, Monash University, Selangor, Malaysia

Tropical Medicine and Biology Platform, Monash University, Selangor, Malaysia

e-mail: sunil.lal@monash.edu

# 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_5

49