GVK BIO Service: Drug Repurposing and Repositioning

Drug repurposing is rapidly emerging as the most preferred route for launching new treatment agents, and is loosely defined as the process of identifying new therapeutic indications to existing clinical or marketed drug molecules.

Why choose drug repurposing?

Reduced cost, accessibility of safety, toxicity and bioavailability information and faster turnaround times are the core strengths of a drug repurposing programme. Drug repurposing innovates not with respect to the drug but the disease and treatment and can be applied to various types of compounds that have failed to show efficacy in late stage clinical trials, stuck in development for commercial reasons or passed patent expiry.

The drug-target-disease triad is the starting point, as well as the end result of drug repurposing initiatives, and represents some of the most perplexing networks in biology. To address and dissect each of these components, GVK BIO has developed an integrated platform that captures interactions between these components at various levels, such as genes, proteins, pathways, on-target and off-target effects, clinical implications and more. From this, a novel, unifying concept emerges between the given candidate drug and its potential therapeutic indications. The flexibility to carry out drug centric/target centric/disease centric repurposing effort is the distinguishing feature of our algorithm, as it creates a variety of choices to select the programme based on the individual needs and priorities of the client’s organisation. The multi-pronged drug repurposing approach at GVK BIO, explores and exploits the relationship between drug-target-disease at various levels, using eight different strategies.

Validation studies of a very popular drug X, which has been in the market for nearly two or three decades for multiple indications, using our repurposing platform, has shown that this drug X could be used for new indications, such as bone disorders, alcoholism and leishmaniasis.

The unique features of GVK BIO’s repurposing platform include.

• Identification of non-obvious/hidden therapeutic indications for a given drug
• Extension of repurposing recommendations for the candidate drug to in-house preclinical discovery service
• Combination of strategies includes structural similarity, gene expression, interactome, adverse events, etc.
• Multi-domain expertise in handling database and biology aspects of drug repurposing
• Customised repurposing solutions to suit multiple/changing priorities of drug discovery and development set-ups
• Ability to develop an online query based repurposing tool suitable to the client’s needs