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Drug repurposing has been proposed as a strategy to develop new therapies that has fewer risks, lower costs and shorter timelines than developing completely new drugs. However, the potential of this strategy has not been as widely realized as hoped, in part owing to legal and regulatory barriers. Here, we highlight these barriers and consider how they could be overcome.
Rick Brown, vice president of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Genentech, discusses how the company is tackling the challenges of discovering novel antibiotics.
The market for hepatocellular carcinoma is set to change with the recent approvals of the kinase inhibitor lenvatinib and the immune checkpoint inhibitor nivolumab, as well as the anticipated approvals of further immunotherapies.
The requirement for delivery by injection is currently a limitation for the use of biologic drugs such as antibodies. In this Review, Mitragotri and colleagues discuss advances made in non-invasive drug delivery for biologics, including the transdermal, oral and inhalation routes, highlighting which routes are the most promising and the additional challenges to bringing these systems to the clinic.
Drug repurposing — a strategy for identifying new uses for approved or investigational drugs that are outside the scope of the original medical indication — has the potential for greater success rates and reduced costs compared with developing entirely new drugs. Pirmohamed and colleagues present approaches used for drug repurposing, discuss the challenges faced by the repurposing community and recommend innovative ways by which these challenges could be addressed.
Determination of the crystal structures of more than 50 human G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) during the past decade has provided a platform for structure-based drug design for this key target class, which is being augmented with cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) structures and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy studies of dynamic features. This Review describes the application of NMR techniques to GPCRs and projects where crystal and/or cryo-EM structures have been complemented with NMR studies and discusses the impact of this integrative approach on GPCR biology and drug discovery.
