The traditional drug discovery process is slow and costly, typically taking 12 to 15 years from regulatory development to final approval. This approach is particularly ineffective in public health emergencies or when dealing with rare diseases that affect only a small portion of the population—situations where industry and private investment opportunities are limited compared to the high costs of development processes.
In this context, drug repurposing has emerged as an alternative strategy to accelerate treatment development. It involves finding new therapeutic uses for already known drugs, leveraging existing information about their safety, efficacy, and manufacturing processes.
This approach allows drug repurposing to bypass the initial stages of clinical development and phase I clinical trials. With this strategy, after in vitro and in vivo studies, the process moves directly to phase II clinical trials, where treatment in patients will confirm or disprove its therapeutic efficacy.
This advancement significantly reduces the time and cost compared to the traditional drug development process. Moreover, by building on existing knowledge of drug safety and clinical use, it minimizes risks and reduces uncertainty in the development process, enabling a faster response in health emergencies.
The methodology associated with drug repurposing has also evolved in recent years. While it was originally based on serendipitous discoveries, today drug repurposing follows a more rational approach, using libraries of approved compounds and advanced computational techniques to identify new indications. This approach has proven useful in identifying treatments for critical situations, such as the use of Remdesivir for COVID-19.
However, much remains to be done. The future of drug development demands progress towards truly disruptive therapies supported by technologies such as deep learning, big data, and models based on human biology. At the same time, collaboration between researchers and the ability to integrate knowledge from multiple fields and map diseases at different scales will be key to developing more effective treatments.
The information provided here is based on the article “Is drug repurposing really the future of drug discovery or is new innovation truly the way forward?” by Carmen Gil and Ana Martínez (2021).
At RePo-SUDOE, we remain committed to promoting knowledge sharing and learning to demonstrate the potential of drug repurposing and to show that sometimes the most innovative solutions lie in what we already know.
