Content area
Full Text
CO R R E S P O N D E N C E
The Drug Repurposing Hub: a next-generation drug library and information resource
2017 Nature America, Inc., part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.
To the Editor:
Drug repurposing, the application of an existing therapeutic to a new disease indication, holds promise of rapid clinical impact at a lower cost than de novo drug development. So far, there has not been a systematic effort to identify such opportunities, limited in part by the lack of a comprehensive library of clinical compounds suitable for testing. To address this challenge, we hand-curated a collection of 4,707 compounds, experimentally confirmed their identities, and annotated them with literature-reported targets. The collection includes 3,422 drugs that are marketed around the world or that have been tested in human clinical trials. Compounds were obtained from more than 50 chemical vendors, and the purity of each sample was established. We have thus established a blueprint for others to easily assemble such a repurposing library, and we have created an online Drug Repurposing Hub (http://www.broadinstitute.org/repurposing
Web End =http:// http://www.broadinstitute.org/repurposing
Web End =www.broadinstitute.org/repurposing ) that contains detailed annotation for each of the compounds.
Repurposing is attractive and pragmatic, given the substantial cost and time requirementson average, a decade or morefor drug development1. In addition, a large number of potential drugs never reach clinical testing. Moreover, fewer than 15% of compounds that enter clinical development ultimately receive approval, despite the majority of them being deemed safe2. For either approved or failed drugs for which safety has already been established, finding new indications can rapidly bring benefits to patients. Prior drug-repurposing successes span disease areas; examples include the cyclooxygenase inhibitor aspirin to treat coronary-artery disease, the phosphodiesterase inhibitor sildenafil to treat erectile dysfunction, and the antibiotic erythromycin for impaired gastric motility (Supplementary Table 1)3. Even drugs associated with troubling side effects merit reconsideration, as evidenced by the successful repurposing of the antiemetic thalidomide to treat multiple myeloma4. Risk-mediating measures for avoiding the potential teratogenicity of thalidomide and its derivatives are reasonable in patients with life-threatening cancer, whereas the use of these drugs to treat nausea remains unacceptable.
Although the benefits of repurposing are clear, successes thus far have been mostly serendipitous. Systematic, large-scale repurposing efforts...