Conventional vs Drug repurposing! Do you think they are different?
Drug repositioning and conventional drug discovery are not very different however, there are some distinctions that set them apart in terms of time and cost.
A conventional drug discovery approach works on a de novo principle to identify a new molecular entity. With research and discovery, preclinical, safety review, clinical research, and FDA review it can take a new molecular entity over 5 to 6 years excluding the initial target identifications and development methods which brings an average time to approximately 10-12 years. Over10s of thousand molecules are narrowed down to 10 that are selected for clinical trials. expected return on investment has dropped by over 2 % since 2010 whereas the average costs of development have gone up from US 1.1 billion to over US 2.1 billion in the past decade itself. One of the key challenges that convention discovery faces is the lack of three-dimensional structure of the drug compounds and the targets plus the failure rate during preclinical and clinical testing.
Whereas Drug repurposing utilises a polypharmacology of drugs with a drug-centric and an Omics wide approach to identify all targets that can potentially interact with a drug molecule. This results in gaining information on unwanted targets and leads to curing other diseases. Drug repurposing can reduce healthcare costs, given how laborious, time-consuming, and costly de novo drug discovery projects have been. The increasing amount and availability of public and open source databases, knowledge, algorithms, and servers have encouraged more participants in drug repurposing projects.