Drug discovery is becoming more costly. Between 2003 and 2013, the cost of bringing a drug to market increased by 145% (adjusting for inflation). Further, drugs that do get approval are not homogeneous across medical disciplines, leaving areas of unmet therapeutic need, and often have a high number needed to treat. Drug repurposing, also known as drug repositioning, is the process of finding novel indications for approved drugs, and shows promise in addressing the issues of traditional drug discovery. By building an integrated dataset and developing repositioning algorithms, mechanistically related disease phenotypes and repositioning opportunities can be identified.
Repotrial is an EU Horizon 2020 project that aims to set standards for in silico drug repurposing. In this talk, I will introduce: (1) drug repositioning, and (2) the Repotrial project. I will then discuss RepoDB, an integrated dataset developed in collaboration with partner organisations in Repotrial, and the challenges we have encountered (and are encountering) in its development.