Main Article Content
Abstract
Drug development is a tedious process from the initial discovery to taking the synthesized compound to the market. Regardless of the huge investment amounting tobillions of dollars and over a decade of continual research, the average annual count of new drug approvals has witnessed a decline in the past couple of decades. This lack of therapeutic interventions has resulted in a growing interest for repositioning or repurposing of drugs i.e. using drugs already available for indications other than they were originally sought for.Drug repurposing is an economical doorway to development of various curative or preventive options and addresses, in part, the current drug deficiency crisis. Exploring novel indications for already studied drugs may result in multiple benefits including early access to newer treatment optionsby saving investment in time and money as well as a chance to recoup the costs by IP protection.Drug repurposing is not a novel approach of targeting diseases and one maycome across several successful examples of repurposed agents including minoxidil, sildenafil which are currently market favourites for their new indications. Also, there are myriads of unexplored molecules stacked in the drug libraries which hold enormous potential to reprofile for other diseases.In the current review, we analyze drug repurposing efforts in the past, the current direction and challenges as well as the promise it holds in the future.