A bibliometric review of drug repurposing

Nancy C Baker; Sean Ekins; Antony J Williams; Alexander Tropsha

doi:10.1016/j.drudis.2018.01.018

A bibliometric review of drug repurposing

Drug Discov Today. 2018 Mar;23(3):661-672. doi: 10.1016/j.drudis.2018.01.018. Epub 2018 Jan 9.

Authors

Nancy C Baker¹, Sean Ekins², Antony J Williams³, Alexander Tropsha⁴

Affiliations

¹ Laboratory for Molecular Modeling, UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA; ParlezChem, 123 W Union Street, Hillsborough, NC 27278, USA. Electronic address: nancycbaker@parlezchem.com.
² Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, 840 Main Campus Drive, Lab 3510, Raleigh, NC 27606, USA.
³ ChemConnector, 513 Chestnut Grove Ct., Wake Forest, NC 27587, USA.
⁴ Laboratory for Molecular Modeling, UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, UNC Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA; Kazan Federal University, Kazan 420008, Russia.

Abstract

We have conducted a bibliometric review of drug repurposing by scanning >25 million papers in PubMed and using text-mining methods to gather, count and analyze chemical-disease therapeutic relationships. We find that >60% of the ∼35,000 drugs or drug candidates identified in our study have been tried in more than one disease, including 189 drugs that have been tried in >300 diseases each. Whereas in the majority of cases these drugs were applied in therapeutic areas close to their original use, there have been striking, and perhaps instructive, successful attempts of drug repurposing for unexpected, novel therapeutic areas.

Publication types

Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Review

MeSH terms

Animals
Bibliometrics
Computational Biology / methods
Data Mining / methods
Drug Repositioning / methods*
Humans
Pharmaceutical Preparations / chemistry*
PubMed

Substances

Pharmaceutical Preparations

Abstract

Publication types

MeSH terms

Substances

Grants and funding