Drug repurposing plays an important role in screening old drugs for new therapeutic efficacy. Drug repurposing develops new uses for the existing or abandoned drugs to accelerate the process of drug discovery and decrease the development cost.
The conventional paradigm of a conventional drug discovery progresses via trial and error where we seek a specific drug to act on a very specific target. This results in a slow and extremely expensive approach.
Polypharmacology engages in rational drug discovery with a focus on more effective therapeutic compounds that are also less toxic. Effectively this approach can be termed as one drug and multiple targets. Drug repurposing and drug combinations have proven to be effective approaches as a disease phenotype exhibits association with more than one disease gene thereby urging an approach that is governed by a drug combination approach resulting in increased drug efficacy.
Identifying drug-target interactions is the primary step of drug discovery. Various computational methods are in use to predict drug-target interactions