Drug Repurposing in the Development of Anticancer Agents

Abstract

Background: 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.

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

Methods: 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.

Results and conclusion: 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.

Keywords: Drug repurposing; anticancer; clinical trials; drug development; off-target effects; recent applications..