"Virtual Repurposing Can Speed The Discovery of New Uses for Existing Drugs" - Dr. Inga Peter
The process for discovering drugs tends to be based on the same kind of pigeonholing that doctors use to treat disease: Parkinson’s is one disease; Crohn’s is something completely separate. A new approach, sometimes called virtual repurposing, offers a way to discover unknown connections between “unconnected” diseases that may lead to new treatments. Inga Peter, PhD, professor of genetics and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai writes, “Recent advances in data analysis are making it possible to turn the process on its head. Virtual repurposing begins with existing data. Using new capabilities in biomedical informatics and machine learning, researchers comb through massive quantities of data in search of common genetic links between diseases that, based on symptoms, would seem to have nothing in common. If a shared genetic pathway is discovered, then it may be possible to treat one disease with medicines approved for the other.”
— Inga Peter, PhD, Professor, Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai