The cost for bringing a single new drug to market has been estimated at $1 billion or more – to pay for laboratory research, tests for safety and effectiveness and regulatory requirements. But cancer specialists at Georgetown University Medical Center have developed a new way to identify drugs on the market that could be put to new uses.

The technique, detailed by Dr. Dakshanamurthy Sivanesan in the American Chemical Society’s latest Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, could open the door for repurposing countless existing medicines – cutting drug costs and making new medicines available to patients faster.
Many drugs already approved for one disease might be effective for others, Dakshanamurthy and colleagues noted. But current methods for identifying new uses for old drugs have not been effective. So Dakshanamurthy's team developed a new computer-assisted technique called "Train-Match-Fit-Streamline" (TMFS) that uses 11 factors to quickly pair likely drugs and diseases.
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They found that by using TMFS, they discovered evidence that Celebrex, the popular prescription medicine for pain and inflammation, has a chemical composition that suggests it may work against a difficult-to-treat form of cancer.
They also found that a medicine for hookworm might be effectively used to cut off the blood supply that enables many forms of cancer to grow and spread.
"We anticipate that expanding our TMFS method to the more than 27,000 clinically active agents available worldwide across all targets will be most useful in the repositioning of existing drugs for new therapeutic targets," the researchers said.
The study was funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.
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