Drug Repurposing: How Often Does It Work? | Science | AAAS

Here's an article that will not be popular among some constituencies. It's in a special issue of the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, devoted to how these disciplines have responded to the coronavirus pandemic. And in it, Aled Edwards of the Structural Genomics Consortium surveys past attempts at drug repurposing and arrives at a conclusion that others in the field have as well: it rarely works the way you'd hope. Indeed this paper says that it has been "unable to document a single instance of a drug approved for clinical use where the idea for the clinical trial derived first from a virtual or lab-based screen of old drugs". And the other linked paper above noted that despite all the press, there have been "impressively few data on success rates" for the approach (which it goes on to try to provide). And as is always the case, success depends on how you define it. I agree with Edwards that using the stringent definition given above, that the success rate is likely zero. U

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