Drug Repurposing: Chemistry, Biochemistry & Red Biotechnology

This volume is aimed at explaining how drug repurposing works; to what extent the initial hopes have been realised in finding drugs for neurodegenerative diseases, psychiatric disorders, cancer and diseases caused by parasitic worms. Drug repurposing also has had some success in treating bacterial infections. Multi-drug resistance has emerged as a great challenge in the drug development area. Drug repurposing may help there as well; this has been discussed in the context of TB. Like in many other areas, nano-materials have been helpful in formulating drugs for repurposing.

The first chapter points out that [a] drug repurposing heralds the demise of the magic bullet concept of drug actions [b] both partners in a drug-target pair are promiscuous and drug repurposing is a subset of polypharmacology.

The last chapter talks of vaccine repurposing. Considerable data now exist which makes a compelling case for including this exciting topic.

This book is a fair mix of success stories, a reality check on the status of this approach and challenges ahead in this area.

Munishwar Nath Gupta taught chemistry, biochemistry and biotechnology at IIT Delhi [1975-2018]. A PhD in biochemistry from IISc Bangalore was followed by post-docs at University of Minnesota, USA; MIT, USA; UTC, France and Lund University, Sweden. He is a fellow of NASI, Allahabad and INSA, New Delhi. He has published over 300 scientific articles and edited 7 books so far. His current h-index is 63.