Northeastern University, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Hurtig 102, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Future Med Chem. 2011 Aug;3(10):1307-15. doi: 10.4155/fmc.11.92.
Infectious diseases are an enormous burden to global health and ,since drug discovery is costly, those infectious diseases that affect the developing world are often not pursued by commercial drug-discovery efforts. Therefore, pragmatic means by which new therapeutics can be discovered are needed. One such approach is target repurposing, where pathogen targets are matched with homologous human targets that have been pursued for drug discovery for other indications. In many cases, the medicinal chemistry, structural biology and biochemistry knowledge around these human targets can be directly repurposed to launch and accelerate new drug-discovery efforts against the pathogen targets. This article describes the overarching strategy of target repurposing as a tool for initiating and prosecuting neglected disease drug-discovery programs, highlighting this approach with three case studies.
传染病对全球健康造成了巨大的负担，而且由于药物研发成本高昂，那些影响发展中国家的传染病往往不会成为商业药物研发的目标。因此，需要寻找实际可行的方法来发现新的治疗方法。其中一种方法是重新定位目标，即将病原体的目标与已经针对其他适应症进行药物发现的同源人类目标相匹配。在许多情况下，这些人类目标的药物化学、结构生物学和生物化学知识可以直接重新用于启动和加速针对病原体目标的新药研发工作。本文描述了将目标重新定位作为启动和推进被忽视疾病药物研发计划的工具的总体策略，并用三个案例研究突出了这种方法。
