Systematic drug repurposing
Testing cheap old drugs, aspirin, metformin, statins, beta-blockers, as cancer treatments, because they are safe, available and sometimes work.
Large randomised trials of repurposed agents have given sobering results: metformin did not improve invasive disease-free survival in the adjuvant breast cancer trial MA.32 (NCT01101438), while aspirin continues to be tested for adjuvant benefit (Add-Aspirin, NCT02804815) and is established in Lynch syndrome prevention. AI screening of prescription and expression databases now proposes candidates faster than trials can test them, and funding for non-proprietary agents is the real bottleneck.
How it works
Approved drugs with known safety are tested against cancer endpoints, either on mechanistic grounds or on signals mined from real-world prescription data.
- Known safety and cost, so adoption is immediate if positive
- Attractive for prevention and low-resource settings
- AI can prioritise candidates from existing data
- No commercial sponsor, so trials are slow and underfunded
- Observational signals are heavily confounded
- Major trials have been negative
Latest papers
topQuery for this technology: (TITLE:"Systematic drug repurposing" OR ABSTRACT:"Systematic drug repurposing") AND (cancer OR tumor OR tumour OR oncology OR carcinoma OR lymphoma OR leukemia OR leukaemia OR myeloma OR sarcoma OR melanoma OR glioma). Results are unfiltered search hits about Systematic drug repurposing, not a curated reading list.
Pages like this
not linked directly; found by shared links- TechnologyBreath and volatile-organic-compound detection
Shares Paths to cures: interception, eradication, control, Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035, Colorectal cancer and the tag frontier.
- TechnologyTrained innate immunity
Shares Paths to cures: interception, eradication, control, Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035 and the tag frontier.
- TechnologyTotal-body PET for screening and ultra-low-dose imaging
Shares Paths to cures: interception, eradication, control, Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035 and the tag frontier.
- TechnologyPhotothermal (plasmonic) nanoparticle ablation
Shares Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035 and the tag frontier.
- TechnologyMagnetic nanoparticle hyperthermia
Shares Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035 and the tag frontier.
- TechnologyMetabolic therapy: starving the tumour of a nutrient
Shares Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035, Exercise & lifestyle oncology and the tag frontier.
- TechnologyQuantum-dot and molecular ultrasound imaging agents
Shares Radical oncology: what could change the war by 2035 and the tag frontier.
- TechnologyADC payload neutralisers
Shares AI-driven drug & target discovery and the tag frontier.