scholarly journals Microarrays and NGS for Drug Discovery

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura-Ancuta Pop ◽  
Oana Zanoaga ◽  
Paul Chiroi ◽  
Andreea Nutu ◽  
Schuyler S. Korban ◽  
...  

Novel technologies and state of the art platforms developed and launched over the last two decades such as microarrays, next-generation sequencing, and droplet PCR have provided the medical field many opportunities to generate and analyze big data from the human genome, particularly of genomes altered by different diseases like cancer, cardiovascular, diabetes and obesity. This knowledge further serves for either new drug discovery or drug repositioning. Designing drugs for specific mutations and genotypes will dramatically modify a patient’s response to treatment. Among other altered mechanisms, drug resistance is of concern, particularly when there is no response to cancer therapy. Once these new platforms for omics data are in place, available information will be used to pursue precision medicine and to establish new therapeutic guidelines. Target identification for new drugs is necessary, and it is of great benefit for critical cases where no alternatives are available. While mutational status is of highest importance as some mutations can be pathogenic, screening of known compounds in different preclinical models offer new and quick strategies to find alternative frameworks for treating more diseases with limited therapeutic options.

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (28) ◽  
pp. 5340-5362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Chen ◽  
Giuseppe Gumina ◽  
Kristopher G. Virga

:As a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mostly affects older people, Parkinson’s disease is a growing health threat to our ever-aging population. Despite remarkable advances in our understanding of this disease, all therapeutics currently available only act to improve symptoms but cannot stop the disease progression. Therefore, it is essential that more effective drug discovery methods and approaches are developed, validated, and used for the discovery of disease-modifying treatments for Parkinson’s disease. Drug repurposing, also known as drug repositioning, or the process of finding new uses for existing or abandoned pharmaceuticals, has been recognized as a cost-effective and timeefficient way to develop new drugs, being equally promising as de novo drug discovery in the field of neurodegeneration and, more specifically for Parkinson’s disease. The availability of several established libraries of clinical drugs and fast evolvement in disease biology, genomics and bioinformatics has stimulated the momentums of both in silico and activity-based drug repurposing. With the successful clinical introduction of several repurposed drugs for Parkinson’s disease, drug repurposing has now become a robust alternative approach to the discovery and development of novel drugs for this disease. In this review, recent advances in drug repurposing for Parkinson’s disease will be discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3599
Author(s):  
Yoshimi Harada ◽  
Huayi Wang ◽  
Kota Kodama ◽  
Shintaro Sengoku

Biotech startup firms developing pharmaceutical seeds from scientific and technological innovation are burdened by significant Research & Development (R&D) expenses, long-term R&D operations, and low probability of R&D success. To address these challenges while sustainably creating innovations and new drugs, business alliances with existing pharmaceutical companies are one of the most important issues on the management agenda. The present study explores the necessity and significance of business alliances with pharmaceutical companies for the development of drug-discovery by Japanese biotech startup firms under high uncertainty. This study investigates the types of alliances to understand the origins of sustainability of these creative activities. First, we investigate and analyze the details of the partnership and its impact on the products under development based on the publicly available information of 16 drug discovery biotech startup firms in Japan that had become public since 2010. As a result, all firms continued their operations with the funds obtained from the business alliances with pharmaceutical firms at the time of their initial public offering (IPO). In addition, 56% of these firms’ alliance projects (n = 73) were seeded-out, and 32% seeded-in, indicating that they had adopted flexible alliance strategies not limited to seed-out ones. For sustainable going concern of the biotech startup business, it is valuable to consider multiple strategic options: “in-licensing and value up”, “best-in-class”, “platform leadership” and “first-in-class” depending on the characteristics of seeds and environmental restrictions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 1465-1474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ming Hao ◽  
Stephen H Bryant ◽  
Yanli Wang

AbstractWhile novel technologies such as high-throughput screening have advanced together with significant investment by pharmaceutical companies during the past decades, the success rate for drug development has not yet been improved prompting researchers looking for new strategies of drug discovery. Drug repositioning is a potential approach to solve this dilemma. However, experimental identification and validation of potential drug targets encoded by the human genome is both costly and time-consuming. Therefore, effective computational approaches have been proposed to facilitate drug repositioning, which have proved to be successful in drug discovery. Doubtlessly, the availability of open-accessible data from basic chemical biology research and the success of human genome sequencing are crucial to develop effective in silico drug repositioning methods allowing the identification of potential targets for existing drugs. In this work, we review several chemogenomic data-driven computational algorithms with source codes publicly accessible for predicting drug–target interactions (DTIs). We organize these algorithms by model properties and model evolutionary relationships. We re-implemented five representative algorithms in R programming language, and compared these algorithms by means of mean percentile ranking, a new recall-based evaluation metric in the DTI prediction research field. We anticipate that this review will be objective and helpful to researchers who would like to further improve existing algorithms or need to choose appropriate algorithms to infer potential DTIs in the projects. The source codes for DTI predictions are available at: https://github.com/minghao2016/chemogenomicAlg4DTIpred.


Author(s):  
Saravanan Jayaram ◽  
Emdormi Rymbai ◽  
Deepa Sugumar ◽  
Divakar Selvaraj

The traditional methods of drug discovery and drug development are a tedious, complex, and costly process. Target identification, target validation; lead identification; and lead optimization are a lengthy and unreliable process that further complicates the discovery of new drugs. A study of more than 15 years reports that the success rate in the discovery of new drugs in the fields of ophthalmology, cardiovascular, infectious disease, and oncology to be 32.6%, 25.5%, 25.2% and 3.4%, respectively. A tedious and costly process coupled with a very low success rate makes the traditional drug discovery a less attractive option. Therefore, an alternative to traditional drug discovery is drug repurposing, a process in which already existing drugs are repurposed for conditions other than which were originally intended. Typical examples of repurposed drugs are thalidomide, sildenafil, memantine, mirtazapine, mifepristone, etc. In recent times, several databases have been developed to hasten drug repurposing based on the side effect profile, the similarity of chemical structure, and target site. This work reviews the pivotal role of drug repurposing in drug discovery and the databases currently available for drug repurposing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (36) ◽  
pp. 6672-6686
Author(s):  
Emir Salas-Sarduy ◽  
Gabriela T. Niemirowicz ◽  
Juan José Cazzulo ◽  
Vanina E. Alvarez

Chagas disease is a neglected tropical illness caused by the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi. The disease is endemic in Latin America with about 6 million people infected and many more being at risk. Only two drugs are available for treatment, Nifurtimox and Benznidazole, but they have a number of side effects and are not effective in all cases. This makes urgently necessary the development of new drugs, more efficient, less toxic and affordable to the poor people, who are most of the infected population. In this review we will summarize the current strategies used for drug discovery considering drug repositioning, phenotyping screenings and target-based approaches. In addition, we will describe in detail the considerations for setting up robust enzymatic assays aimed at identifying and validating small molecule inhibitors in high throughput screenings.


Author(s):  
Mithun Rudrapal ◽  
Shubham J. Khairnar ◽  
Anil G. Jadhav

Drug repurposing (DR) (also known as drug repositioning) is a process of identifying new therapeutic use(s) for old/existing/available drugs. It is an effective strategy in discovering or developing drug molecules with new pharmacological/therapeutic indications. In recent years, many pharmaceutical companies are developing new drugs with the discovery of novel biological targets by applying the drug repositioning strategy in drug discovery and development program. This strategy is highly efficient, time saving, low-cost and minimum risk of failure. It maximizes the therapeutic value of a drug and consequently increases the success rate. Thus, drug repositioning is an effective alternative approach to traditional drug discovery process. Finding new molecular entities (NME) by traditional or de novo approach of drug discovery is a lengthy, time consuming and expensive venture. Drug repositioning utilizes the combined efforts of activity-based or experimental and in silico-based or computational approaches to develop/identify the new uses of drug molecules on a rational basis. It is, therefore, believed to be an emerging strategy where existing medicines, having already been tested safe in humans, are redirected based on a valid target molecule to combat particularly, rare, difficult-to-treat diseases and neglected diseases.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kouji Banno ◽  
Miho Iida ◽  
Megumi Yanokura ◽  
Haruko Irie ◽  
Kenta Masuda ◽  
...  

The goals of drug repositioning are to find a new pharmacological effect of a drug for which human safety and pharmacokinetics are established and to expand the therapeutic range of the drug to another disease. Such drug discovery can be performed at low cost and in the short term based on the results of previous clinical trials. New drugs for gynecologic tumors may be found by drug repositioning. For example, PPAR ligands may be effective against ovarian cancer, since PPAR activation eliminates COX-2 expression, arrests the cell cycle, and induces apoptosis. Metformin, an antidiabetic drug, is effective for endometrial cancer through inhibition of the PI3K-Akt-mTOR pathway by activating LKB1-AMPK and reduction of insulin and insulin-like growth factor-1 due to AMPK activation. COX-2 inhibitors for cervical cancer may also be examples of drug repositioning. PGE2 is induced in the arachidonate cascade by COX-2. PGE2 maintains high expression of COX-2 and induces angiogenic factors including VEGF and bFGF, causing carcinogenesis. COX-2 inhibitors suppress these actions and inhibit carcinogenesis. Combination therapy using drugs found by drug repositioning and current anticancer drugs may increase efficacy and reduce adverse drug reactions. Thus, drug repositioning may become a key approach for gynecologic cancer in drug discovery.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (41) ◽  
pp. 7337-7371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria A. Chiacchio ◽  
Giuseppe Lanza ◽  
Ugo Chiacchio ◽  
Salvatore V. Giofrè ◽  
Roberto Romeo ◽  
...  

: Heterocyclic compounds represent a significant target for anti-cancer research and drug discovery, due to their structural and chemical diversity. Oxazoles, with oxygen and nitrogen atoms present in the core structure, enable various types of interactions with different enzymes and receptors, favoring the discovery of new drugs. Aim of this review is to describe the most recent reports on the use of oxazole-based compounds in anticancer research, with reference to the newly discovered iso/oxazole-based drugs, to their synthesis and to the evaluation of the most biologically active derivatives. The corresponding dehydrogenated derivatives, i.e. iso/oxazolines and iso/oxazolidines, are also reported.


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