A Review of Computational Drug Repositioning Approaches

Abstract

Computational drug repositioning emerges as a new idea of drug discovery and development. Contrary to conventional routines, computational drug repositioning encompasses low risk and high safety. Some successful cases demonstrated its advantage. Therefore, a large number of computational drug repositioning approaches have been developed over the past decades. We summarized briefly these methods and classified them into target-based, gene-expression-based, phenome-based and multi-omics-based categories according to strategies of drug repositioning. We reviewed some representatives of computational drug repositioning methods in each category, with emphasis on detail of techniques and finally discussed developing trends of computational drug repositioning.

Keywords: Drug repositioning; Drug target; Gene expression profile; Heterogeneous network; Machine learning; Phenotype.