Division of Laboratory and Genomic Medicine, Department of Pathology and Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis, MO, USA.
Brief Bioinform. 2011 Jul;12(4):327-35. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbr028. Epub 2011 Jun 29.
Repurposing and repositioning drugs--discovering new uses for existing and experimental medicines-is an attractive strategy for rescuing stalled pharmaceutical projects, finding treatments for neglected diseases, and reducing the time, cost and risk of drug development. As this strategy emerged, academic researchers began performing high-throughput screens (HTS) of small molecules--the type of experiments once exclusively conducted in industry--and making the data from these screens available to all. Several methods can mine this data to inform repurposing and repositioning efforts. Despite these methods' limitations, it is hopeful that they will accelerate the discovery of new uses for known drugs, but this hope has not yet been realized.
药物的再利用和再定位——发现现有和实验药物的新用途——是挽救停滞不前的药物研发项目、寻找治疗被忽视疾病的方法以及减少药物研发时间、成本和风险的一种有吸引力的策略。随着这一策略的出现，学术研究人员开始进行小分子的高通量筛选（HTS）——这种类型的实验曾经只在工业界进行——并将这些筛选的数据提供给所有人。有几种方法可以挖掘这些数据，为药物的再利用和再定位提供信息。尽管这些方法存在局限性，但人们希望它们能加速已知药物新用途的发现，但这一希望尚未实现。
