Can Drug Repurposing Provide Treatments Quicker?

The journey for a medication from the laboratory to the pharmacy is long and often fraught with complexities, to ensure that any drugs that are used are safe, work well and are good value for money.

According to Pfizer, one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, medication can take over 10 years to develop, from making a promising discovery, through several phases of clinical trials before finally reaching patients who need them.

This time, as well as the expense of drug research, can be frustrating for people who find that there is a promising treatment for a condition that they have but it has yet to receive approval.

However, is there an alternative approach that could provide medical treatments much faster and in a way that is more affordable for researchers and patients alike?

What Is Drug Repurposing?

The concept of drug repurposing is simple; instead of going through the entire trial and approval process, a manufacturer could take an existing drug used to treat another condition and explore whether it could be used to treat another condition.

The advantages are that because the drug is already known and has already passed several safety tests, it has fewer clinical trial stages to go through, it is already being manufactured so it can be provided to pharmacies faster, and would be more affordable to do research on and produce.

There are a lot of examples of this, with repositioning both being used to treat seemingly untreatable conditions as well as provide a way for research on neglected diseases to be carried out affordably.

There are several famous examples of drug repurposing in action. One of the most famous of these was a vasodilator used to treat high blood pressure by the name of minoxidil.

First approved in 1979, the Upjohn Company (later a division of Pfizer) explored the potential for repurposing the medication for hypertension similar to what would later happen with sildenafil.

However, when a study demonstrated a remarkable level of hair growth, the research quickly changed to see if minoxidil could potentially be used to treat hair loss, a condition without a reliable treatment at the time.

Ultimately, after it was discovered that doctors were providing minoxidil to balding patients as an off-label, the medication was eventually approved for hair loss and has continued to be used ever since.

Another particularly striking example came in the treatment of leprosy using thalidomide.

In the 1950s, thalidomide was at the centre of one of the biggest medical controversies in history, as a gap in how drugs were tested at the time led to severe birth defects that caused lifelong medical complications.

This led to it being banned, but during that time, Jacob Sheskin, a doctor based in Jerusalem found that the medication helped to relieve one of the major symptoms of leprosy, erythema nodosum leprosum (ENL).

It was approved in Brazil in 1965 and by the American Food and Drug Administration in 1998 albeit with exceptionally strict conditions on its use to avoid the side effects that led to its ban in the first place.

Whilst it is not the first-line treatment anymore, it has helped treat a condition that was seen as difficult to treat for thousands of years.