A novel computational approach for drug repurposing using systems biology

Identification of novel therapeutic effects for existing US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs, drug repurposing, is an approach aimed to dramatically shorten the drug discovery process, which is costly, slow and risky. Several computational approaches use transcriptional data to find potential repurposing candidates. The main hypothesis of such approaches is that if gene expression signature of a particular drug is opposite to the gene expression signature of a disease, that drug may have a potential therapeutic effect on the disease. However, this may not be optimal since it fails to consider the different roles of genes and their dependencies at the system level.