Marshfield Clinic-Led Research Team Finding New Uses for Existing Drugs
Friday, April 10th, 2015 -- 8:14 AM
-Finding new uses for existing drugs has become increasingly important for treating diseases and a Marshfield Clinic-led research team has proven a new way to speed up the process, according to a study published in Nature Biotechnology.Drug repurposing is the process of discovering new uses for existing drugs. The process is becoming increasingly important in drug development as success rates for new drugs in clinical trials decrease and costs increase. Critical to drug repurposing is initially identifying candidate drug-disease relationships.
Using a type of genetic study called a phenome-wide association study, researchers identified thousands of potential disease and drug relationships. This could serve as an early clue when looking for drugs that may effectively treat diseases they're not currently prescribed for.
A team of researchers, using the phenome-wide approach, identified more than 14,800 examples of where a drug might be used to treat an unrelated disease. They did this by cross-referencing drug-disease pairs identified by phenome-wide data with existing medical literature to find examples where a disease and drug were mentioned in the same article.
They also found more than 38,000 novel drug-disease relationships not yet studied, according to the medical literature. These results suggest phenome-wide association study data may bring to light many additional diseases that may be treated with already developed drugs.
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