Could a bottle of pills in your medicine storage locker aid in the fight against tomorrow ’s health problem ? Scientists remember they could .
Using publically approachable databases , investigator have developed a method of predicting the unexpected benefits of existing drug , and how they might be repurposed for treating apparently unrelated diseases .
Just this yr , a team of researcher discovered thata normally dictate arthritis medication was effective in the discourse of melanoma in brute model . It sound unbelievable , but example of science feel new uses for older drugs are numerous . ScienceNOW ’s Kai Kupferschmidt describe :
https://gizmodo.com/how-a-cheap-arthritis-medicine-could-become-a-miracle-c-5784966
There are plenty of examples of drugs in the beginning developed to treat one disease that turned out to help another : Acetylsalicylic acid ( aspirin ) is not just a painfulness killer but is also used to reduce the risk of infection of pith attempt . And when a blood press drug call sildenafil was happen upon to have an unexpected side consequence , it went on to become the erectile dysfunction smash hit now known as Viagra . Such crossovers can save drug developers a lot of time and money . make grow a single new drug on average takes more than a decade and costs about $ 800 million . Existing drugs have do it safety profile and are approved for human utilisation , so they can be rapidly evaluated for unexampled denotation .
Now Atul Butte , a bioinformatics expert from Stanford University , has published two studies in the latest egress of Science that show how combine entropy on the genetic issue of existing drugs with data on the genic impact of various disease allow for an efficient method acting of finding new U.S. for sure-enough medications .
“ Our surmise was , if a disease is characterise by certain changes in gene expression and if a drug causes the reverse alteration , then that drug could have a therapeutic event on the disease , ” says Butte .
sound pretty straight ahead , right-hand ? We lately reported onthe business leader of public databases and the riches of information they contain . To demonstrate the power of his organization , Butte used these same database to search for existing curative candidates for 100 different diseases . He establish drug candidates for 53 of the diseases , many of them unexpected , include one that portend that an epilepsy drug could be used to treat instigative intestine syndromes like Crohn ’s disease .
https://gizmodo.com/how-database-searches-solved-a-50-year-old-medical-myst-5814998
When they followed up by look into the alterative essence of the epilepsy drug , Butte and his colleagues found it to have a significant effect in the rodent example they tested . But more important than this finding is the supporting it offers to the use of the squad ’s refined method of using public molecular data in the discovery of new disease therapy .
Science ( Article 1,Article 2 ) ViaScienceNOW
Top image via Rob Byron / Shutterstock
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