摘要
The need for new therapeutic approaches:Conventional drug discovery is a lengthy and expensive process,taking decades and billions of dollars to get a drug from bench to bedside.Much of the costs incurred are at the pre-clinical stages,between drug design and synthesis to delineating the cellular“Mechanisms of Action”(MoA).Notably,there is a very high risk of failure,and only a very small proportion of therapeutic agents reach later-phase clinical trials.Accordingly,drug repositioning has become a valuable strategy aimed at fast-tracking treatments into clinical use and improving the chances of therapeutic success.A novel addition to this approach is connectivity mapping,which defines cell-specific transcriptional responses to small molecules in disease-dependent contexts.This commentary outlines how some of the latest innovations in connectivity mapping can be exploited for drug repurposing.
