Ongoing efforts to find new drug targets are continuing, but traditional drug development requires approximately 12-16 years processing time and investment of USD$1-2 billion to achieve market approval. This lengthy development pipeline, while necessary for identifying innovative treatments, is not the only option for providing patients with timely access to efficacious, cost-effective therapy. Drug repurposing is a method for identifying new uses for approved or investigational drugs that are outside the scope of the original intended or approved medical use. The development of repurposed drugs is attractive because therapeutic advances and new drug options for treatment-resistant cancer has been far slower than expected.
The Australian program for drug repurposing for treatment resistant ovarian cancer is rapidly delivering data to support the development of clinical trial concepts for the use of repurposed drugs specific for treatment resistant ovarian cancer.
The program team uses computational chemistry approaches to examine the British Pharmacopeia, currently the most globally comprehensive pharmacology database, for Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved drugs that bind to well-defined targets specific to treatment-resistant cancers. Consumer, clinician and scientific input is gathered at each step of the pipeline and health research economic analysis conducted on all repurposed drug candidates. The drug repurposing pipeline can be adapted for any known drug target for any disease or condition.