Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2021 August 21

Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 21

Need a Good Example of Drug Repurposing (Other than Sildanafil)

I'm writing a paper on how specific kinds of Artificial Intelligence software has been used to combat the Covid pandemic. One use has been for drug repurposing. This paper is meant more for IT people than medical people so I want to have an example of drug repurposing in the intro, something that ideally would be easily grasped by a non-medical audience. When I google it I keep getting Sildanafil which was originally for something else but was repurposed for erectile dysfunction and marketed as Viagra. I currently am using that example, and maybe I'm underestimating the maturity of my audience but I would prefer an example that doesn't involve a topic that lends itself to jokes. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 17:20, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

Aspirin? A pain killer, now commonly also used as a preventative for heart attacks, maybe? AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:32, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

This article mentions the use of the anti-fungal drug Ketoconazole to treat prostrate cancer. Alansplodge (talk) 18:27, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

Thalidomide and minoxidil would probably both fit the bill for repurposed drugs.

That said, during the COVID pandemic, artificial intelligence has mostly been used to generate publications, rather than any clinically-useful results. AI-driven drug-repurposing screens in general have a very low success rate—I'm struggling a bit to think of any solid examples.... TenOfAllTrades(talk) 20:10, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

Rapamycin was initially developed as an antibiotic and tetracyclines are used as general antiinflammatory drugs. Zidovudine was developed as an anti-cancer drug but became the first affective treatment of the HIV infection. Ruslik_Zero 20:33, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

Our drug repurposing article is a good place to find lead refs and/or a good place to add additional discussion and examples. DMacks (talk) 21:12, 21 August 2021 (UTC)

As usual, excellent. Thanks to all. Regarding TenOfAllTrades's comment, I agree. That is actually going to be one of my points that there hasn't been much work done in Drug Repurposing and there should be. Also, just to clarify the kind of software I'm talking about is sort of on the edge of AI. It is data technology for things like knowledge graphs: RDF, property graphs, and OWL. Although even in that field I agree, there are far too many researchers who think building an ontology counts as research. Again, that's one of my points, but I have found a surprising amount of work that incorporated real data and even had empirical tests by real doctors and other users. --MadScientistX11 (talk) 02:29, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

I'm surprised that no-one so far has mentioned dexamethasone, which is now extensively repurposed for Covid, MadScientistX11. Mike Turnbull (talk) 14:52, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

It depends on how broad a definition of "repurposed" one uses, I suppose. A far as I know, the use of dexamethasone in COVID therapy isn't capitalizing on an unexpected side effect or atypical mechanism of action, and other corticosteroids (e.g. methylprednisolone) appear to be similarly beneficial. Is it still 'repurposing' when it's a known anti-inflammatory drug being used to fight inflammation? TenOfAllTrades(talk) 16:37, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Agreed, it depends on your definition. However, the link I gave does put dexamethasone within the Covid drug repurposing article, so clearly some at least of Wikipedia's editors count it that way. Mike Turnbull (talk) 16:48, 22 August 2021 (UTC)