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Recently, WHO states that repurposed drugs did not cut down mortality due to COVID-19
What is it?
- Drug repurposing(profiling) is is a strategy for identifying new uses for approved or investigational drugs that are outside the scope of the original medical indication
- This strategy offers various advantages over developing an entirely new drug for a given indication
- Drug repositioning is a “universal strategy” for neglected diseases due to
- Reduced number of required clinical trial steps could reduce the time and costs for the medicine to reach the market
- Existing pharmaceutical supply chains could facilitate “formulation and distribution” of the drug
- Known possibility of combining with other drugs could allow more effective treatment,
- The repositioning could facilitate the discovery of “new mechanisms of action for old drugs and new classes of medicines”
- The removal of “activation barriers” of early research stages can enable the project to advance rapidly into disease-oriented research.
Some of the examples of repurposed drugs are:
- A number of successes have been achieved, the foremost including sildenafil (Viagra) for erectile dysfunction and pulmonary hypertension and thalidomide for leprosy and multiple myeloma
- Others are Remdesivir, Hydroxychloroquine, Lopinavir/Ritonavir(not successful)
Source:
The Hindu
