On Identifying Candidates for Drug Repurposing for the Treatment of Ulcerative Colitis using Gene Expression Data

Abstract

The notion of repurposing of existing drugs to treat both common and rare diseases has gained traction from both academia and pharmaceutical companies. Given the high attrition rates, massive time, money, and effort of brand-new drug development, the advantages of drug repurposing in terms of lower costs and shorter development time have become more appealing. Computational drug repurposing is promising approach and has shown great potential in tailoring genomic findings to the development of treatments for diseases. However, there are still challenges involved in building a standard computational drug repurposing solution for high-throughput analysis and the implementation to clinical practice. In this study, we applied the computational drug repurposing approaches for Ulcerative Colitis (UC) patients to provide better treatment for this disabling disease. Repositioning drug candidates were identified, and these findings provide a potentially effective therapeutics for the treatment of UC patients. This preliminary computational drug repurposing pipeline will be extended in the near future to help realize the full potential of drug repurposing.