<br/>Cheminformatics includes literature informatics, a field of endeavor encompassing document retrieval and literature mining. Herein, we mined biomedical literature annotated in PubMed to assess the scope of drug repurposing, the phenomenon of using known drugs to treat conditions that the drugs were not prescribed for.  We have analyzed the evolution of all drug–disease relationships mined from PubMed taking the date of the first report on specific drug-disease connectivity as an indication of the initial indication vs. subsequent use for another indication.  The analysis extends back to drug treatments from the 1940’s and provides a historical overview up to the present day. We find that most drugs have been tested as treatments against more than one disease and some compounds have been tried in hundreds of diseases. Caffeine, for instance, has been tried clinically or experimentally on over 350 diseases. Specific examples of drugs that have been tested and used in a variety of diseases will be discussed, examining what motivated researchers to try the drug on a new disease. 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.<br/>

Drug repurposing is a common phenomenon: Bibliometric and cheminformatics evidence based on PubMed data

2019 Spring National Meeting

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