Drug Repositioning Strategies for the Identification of Novel Therapies for Rheumatic Autoimmune Inflammatory Diseases.

Rheumatic Autoimmune Inflammatory Diseases such as Sjögren's and lupus lack modern treatments. Less than 5% of drugs approved by the FDA from 2014 to mid-2016 had a RAID indication. Many RAID standard-of-care drugs were repurposed based on serendipitous observations, similarity-of-disease categorization, and/or off-target effects. Recently, drug repurposing has become more intentional, relying on an evolving awareness of molecular underpinnings, as well as a better understanding of drug-target interactions by computational modeling. Understanding mechanisms of disease pathogenesis can be synergistic in identifying new drug candidates and target pathways using unbiased Big-Data repositioning approaches as genomics, PheWAS (disease mechanism-of-action), GWAS and/or epigenetic-profiling.