Drug Repurposing in the Development of Anticancer Agents

• Published in: Current medicinal chemistry Vol. 26; no. 28; p. 5410
• Main Authors: Olgen, Sureyya, Kotra, Lakshmi P
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United Arab Emirates 01.01.2019
• Subjects: Animals; Antineoplastic Agents - chemistry; Antineoplastic Agents - therapeutic use; Drug Development; Drug Repositioning; Humans; Molecular Structure; Neoplasms - drug therapy; Drug repurposing; drug development; clinical trials; off-target effects; anticancer; recent applications
• ISSN: 1875-533X
• DOI: 10.2174/0929867325666180713155702

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. This review provides an overview of anticancer drug development strategies which is one of the important areas of drug restructuring. 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. 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.