Title:Drug Repurposing in the Development of Anticancer Agents
Volume: 26
Issue: 28
Author(s): Sureyya Olgen*Lakshmi P. Kotra*
Affiliation:
- Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Biruni University, Istanbul,Turkey
- Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3M2,Canada
Keywords:
Drug repurposing, anticancer, drug development, recent applications, clinical trials, off-target effects.
Abstract: Background: Research into repositioning known drugs to treat cancer other than
the originally intended disease continues to grow and develop, encouraged in part, by several
recent success stories. Many of the studies in this article are geared towards repurposing
generic drugs because additional clinical trials are relatively easy to perform and the drug
safety profiles have previously been established.
Objective: This review provides an overview of anticancer drug development strategies which
is one of the important areas of drug restructuring.
Methods: Repurposed drugs for cancer treatments are classified by their pharmacological effects.
The successes and failures of important repurposed drugs as anticancer agents are
evaluated in this review.
Results and Conclusion: Drugs could have many off-target effects, and can be intelligently
repurposed if the off-target effects can be employed for therapeutic purposes. In cancer, due
to the heterogeneity of the disease, often targets are quite diverse, hence a number of already
known drugs that interfere with these targets could be deployed or repurposed with appropriate
research and development.