Finding “New” Drugs to Treat Old Diseases: Novel Drug Targets for Cancer

Today many pharmaceutical drugs have been developed, often to treat a particular disease.  Because licensing a drug requires such expensive and lengthy testing, it is difficult to create a new drug and get it approved, so existing disease treatment options may be few and unsatisfactory. However, we know that many drugs can be effective for multiple conditions, and if regulatory authorities have already approved a prescription drug for one condition, doctors can choose to prescribe it “off-label” for another condition, if that appears clinically useful. If there were a way to identify all the conditions a drug could treat, we could discover a lot more treatments for existing diseases. Researchers have begun to use “big data” analysis to do just that.