Stanford Team Reports Advance in Computational Drug Repositioning

August 17, 2011 | In a spot of high-tech recycling, a group of Stanford researchers has developed an innovative way to identify already-approved drugs that may work against diseases they weren't originally designed to combat, and demonstrated how two such repurposed drugs may have benefits in treating inflammatory bowel disease and lung cancer. The findings, published in two papers Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, come at a time when both drug companies and the NIH are putting greater emphasis on drug repositioning as a way of lowering the costs of drug development and getting therapies to patients more quickly. Wall Street Journal