Repurposing links for treatment of asthma
Chemical classes and mechanisms for repurposing in Type II diabetes
Potential indications and mechanisms for carvedilol
Mechanistic and indication links for mesalazine-like compounds

DrugRepurposing Online is an open access database created by Numedicus, for finding new uses for both existing and abandoned drugs. Importantly, it is differentiated from other attempts to link molecules, targets and diseases, by focussing functional, experimentally validated content.

Users can freely access this search engine after registration.

Users are encouraged to add new examples of drug repurposing. In this way, DrugRepurposing Online is a community of like-minded investigators, and also a gold standard crowdsourced resource for this most efficient and attractive strategy for medicinal innovation.

Database content

This database contains compounds which have been either launched, registered or investigated, covering 478 indications, with 1027 mechanisms. There are 3129 links between mechanism and indication, 883 links between compound and indication and 292 links between compound and mechanism — so-called “off-target” effects. Overall this gives rise to 4304 repurposing opportunities for further consideration.

The database is populated with 4833 literature references, of which 1119 derive from prospective clinical studies or case reports, 239 from retrospective or case control analyses, 2094 are from pharmacological in vivo studies and 490 are from patents. The rest are in vitro studies or genomic associations.

The original Drugrepurposing Online database has recently been supplemented with access to information from the Guide to Pharmacology database (under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License). Where adapted, this information will be be provided to researchers upon request who are interested in its use within DrugRepurposingOnline. As part of this integration, 5281 compounds were obtained as a subset from the full set of 11596 compounds in the Guide To Pharmacology database, after filtration by their categorisation as either FDA-approved drugs, clinical trial drugs, or pre-clinical tool compounds from their incorporation in the Drug Repurposing Hub. This filtered set can be searched for their interactions between compounds and mechanisms, and the results carried forwards for their potential use in various indications.

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Latest News

Patents as a secondary exclusivity driver for new repurposed medicinal products

Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria syndrome is a rare genetic disease that causes accelerated ageing Drug repurposing is often regarded as a cinderella child of new medicine discovery because ‘old drugs have expired [...]

Drug repurposing patents: turning the obvious into the non-obvious

Drug repurposing, the development of new uses for existing drugs, is based significantly on method of use patents. That much is obvious. But for these patent applications to be granted, [...]

How is DrugRepurposing Online different from other, similar databases?

There have been recent developments in databases of value to drug repurposing like ChemBL and DrugBank. These are vast, free sources of information that repurposing can benefit from. But Drug [...]

Body of evidence in favour of calcium channel blockers for Alzheimer disease

While the effort to modify Alzheimer disease pathology by reducing the production of beta amyloid protein has largely been ineffective, there is a range of evidence that a widely used [...]

Retrospective analysis does not equate to prospective efficacy in drug trials for brain cancer

A variety of observational studies have been performed with respect to glioblastoma multiforme, the most lethal form of brain cancer, and the use of sodium valproate, an antiepileptic drug. Patients [...]

Three-fold improvement in Pharma R&D productivity with repurposing

In a recent analysis of the economics of pharmaceutical innovation, Grabowski and DiMasi calculated that out-of-pocket costs for a new chemical entity (NCE) were $1.395bn, compared to the costs for [...]

Antidiabetic sulfonylureas for stroke

The antidiabetic sulfonylureas, which inhibit ATP-sensitive K+ (KATP) channels in pancreatic beta cells and stimulate insulin release in diabetes mellitus, mediate their effect on KATP channels via a high-affinity sulfonylurea [...]