Mentatcurated
▸ Concept

Drug repurposing

Finding new therapeutic uses for drugs already approved for something else — skipping the early safety work because it was already done.

In a nutshell

A drug approved for one disease carries years of safety and pharmacology data. Repurposing asks whether that same molecule treats a different condition — cutting the path from hypothesis to human trial from decades to years. The hard part is incentive: a drug already off-patent earns no exclusivity period, so there is little commercial return to fund the trials, even when the biology is promising. That structural gap is why genuinely useful repurposed drugs often stay unprescribed long after the evidence appears.

Where it came from

Year1991
SourceFDA Orphan Drug Act extensions; the term 'drug repurposing' gained currency in the early 2000s with systematic computational screening approaches
Why it matteredThe practice predates the term — aspirin's cardiovascular use is an early informal example — but organised repurposing programs emerged in the 2000s.

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