Detalle de: Drug Repurposing From Transcriptome Data: Methods and Applications

Traditional drug-discovery approaches are based on the high-throughput screening of thousands of molecules simultaneously in order to identify compounds that show activity against therapeutic targets. This is a very costly and time-consuming process, and cost-effective alternative techniques, mostly based on computational approaches, are one of the main focuses of research in this sector. In this context, drug repurposing is a potential alternative for drug discovery that addresses the problem of the high-cost/efficiency ratio of traditional pipelines. Drug repurposing is based on using existing drugs for new therapeutic applications, which also saves a lot of time because they may directly translate into phase II or III clinical trials. In this context, the development of -omics techniques and the accumulation of large volumes of data, especially whole-genome gene expression data, have allowed researchers to develop new computational approaches for effective drug repurposing. In this chapter, we will describe in detail the main methods, applications, and computational resources for drug repositioning from transcriptome data, the type of data that has made the most progress in the field.