Systematic Drug Repurposing Through Text Mining

Abstract

Drug development remains a time-consuming and highly expensive process with high attrition rates at each stage. Given the safety hurdles drugs must pass due to increased regulatory scrutiny, it is essential for pharmaceutical companies to maximize their return on investment by effectively extending drug life cycles. There have been many effective techniques, such as phenotypic screening and compound profiling, which identify new indications for existing drugs, often referred to as drug repurposing or drug repositioning. This chapter explores the use of text mining leveraging several publicly available knowledge resources and mechanism of action representations to link existing drugs to new diseases from biomedical abstracts in an attempt to generate biologically meaningful alternative drug indications.