A standard database for drug repositioning

Adam S Brown,Chirag J Patel

doi:10.1038/sdata.2017.29

Abstract

Drug repositioning, the process of discovering, validating, and marketing previously approved drugs for new indications, is of growing interest to academia and industry due to reduced time and costs associated with repositioned drugs. Computational methods for repositioning are appealing because they putatively nominate the most promising candidate drugs for a given indication. Comparing the wide array of computational repositioning methods, however, is a challenge due to inconsistencies in method validation in the field. Furthermore, a common simplifying assumption, that all novel predictions are false, is intellectually unsatisfying and hinders reproducibility. We address this assumption by providing a gold standard database, repoDB, that consists of both true positives (approved drugs), and true negatives (failed drugs). We have made the full database and all code used to prepare it publicly available, and have developed a web application that allows users to browse subsets of the data (http://apps.chiragjpgroup.org/repoDB/).

Highlights

Background & SummaryDrug repositioning is the process of discovering, validating, and marketing previously approved drugs for new indications
The number of publications in PubMed with the text ‘drug repositioning’ in their abstracts has ballooned from only 11 articles per year in 2007 to 274 in 2015
Prevalent among repositioning publications are computational methods, which perform in silico experiments to determine the most promising repositioning candidates for further preclinical testing[2,3]

Summary

Introduction

Background & SummaryDrug repositioning is the process of discovering, validating, and marketing previously approved drugs for new indications. Sensitivity- and specificity-based methods rely on comparing the full spectrum of predictions made by a repositioning method to currently approved or investigational drug-indication pairs[14]. We present repoDB, a database of approved and failed drugs and their indications.

Results

Conclusion