‘Drug repositioning can help treat more diseases’

LUCKNOW: Drug repositioning can help treat more diseases with the existing medicines only, said experts at a conference ‘Current Trends in Genomics and Molecular Medicine’ organised at the King George’s Medical University on Wednesday.

“This method can save research expenditure and funds may be spent on finding an entirely new drug. There can be certain properties in a drug for a disease to treat other diseases. For example, medicine A is used for fever but has properties for treating cough also, hence if it is modified a bit it can help treat cough also,” said Dr Nitu Singh, coordinator of the conference.

She said drug repositioning is the application of already approved drugs and compounds to treat a different disease. It may be understood as re-investigating existing drugs.

“There have been instances where drugs that failed for one disease were tested successfully and used for another medical

THERE HAVE BEEN INSTANCES WHERE DRUGS THAT FAILED FOR ONE DISEASE WERE TESTED SUCCESSFULLY AND USED FOR ANOTHER

condition. But this was by chance till now. The future will require more such consistent efforts,” she added.

She said plans were also afoot to start bio-banking at the King George’s KGMU. This will help store samples of bodily fluid for research to improve understanding of health and disease in future. This includes deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA).

Many experts spoke in the conference on genome project, drug approval, and other advances in the field of molecular medicine.

“In future, drug usage will get equal importance with drug discovery. Research and development strategies will also change keeping in view the need,” said Singh.