Finding new uses for existing drugs is called drug reprofiling, repositioning, redirecting, or repurposing and it is increasingly recognized as a way to find new disease treatments at lower cost. We provide a bibliometric overview of the practice of repurposing by analyzing drug–disease relationships text-mined from PubMed. Our analysis extends back to drug treatments from the 1940’s and provides a historical overview up to the present day. While the attention to repurposing may be new, we find that the practice is certainly not. Most drugs have indeed been tested as treatments against more than one disease and some compounds have been tried in hundreds of diseases. Three of these highly reprofiled drugs – the antipsychotic chlorpromazine, the antimalarial chloroquine, and the antiulcer medicine cimetidine were examined in depth by looking at their repurposing activity over time, starting with the first annotation of the drug in the literature up through recent publications. We characterized the diseases and therapeutic areas these drugs were directed at and what evidence motivated researchers to redirect the drugs. While in the majority of cases these drugs were tried on diseases in therapeutic areas close to their original use, there are striking, and perhaps instructive repurposing attempts where drugs have been tried in unexpectedly novel therapeutic areas.

Bibliometric overview of drug repurposing using PubMed

255th National Meeting (2018)

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