**9. Conclusion**

Traditionally, the dug repurposing has a long recorded history discovery of drug molecules particularly through serendipitous observations. In recent years, it has embarked a new avenue in the development of new therapies based upon existing/ approved medicines. The strategic drug repositioning in a more systematic and rational way has brought innovation with the discovery of drug molecules with unknown therapeutic indications. As drug repositioning approach offers significant reduction in R&D costs, greater chances of success, shorter research time and lower investment risk, it has gained increasing market demands. Because these advantages are beneficial for discovery scientists, drug researchers, consumers and pharmaceutical companies, enabling the application of novel approaches of repositioning strategy in the drug discovery program for almost all human diseases. Moreover, the use of *in silico* techniques along with the application of structure-based drug design (SBDD) and pharmacophore modeling strategies and artificial intelligence (AI) technology can further accelerate the process of drug purposing in the drug discovery program. In the era of precision medicine, the drug repositioning strategy has become very much useful to establish the unknown mechanism of action of drugs through exploration of novel disease/metabolic/signaling pathways, or off-targets and target-specific mechanisms/ genetic expression profile for even genetic disorders. Advancement in genomics have provided us with genomic and transcriptomic data in huge quantities using technologies like next generation sequencing, microarray data and transcriptomics, etc. Network biology and systems biology approaches may add additional benefits to unveil such novel mechanisms of actions with through insights into drug-target interaction profile at molecular/genetic level. For better drug repositioning, more in-depth understanding are required to be executed

**19**

**Author details**

Nashik, India

Mithun Rudrapal\*, Shubham J. Khairnar and Anil G. Jadhav

\*Address all correspondence to: rsmrpal@gmail.com

provided the original work is properly cited.

Sandip Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Sandip Foundation, Mahiravani,

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

*Drug Repurposing (DR): An Emerging Approach in Drug Discovery*

effective therapeutic indications for human diseases.

Authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

with integrated approaches between computational and experimental methods to ensure high success rates of repositioned drugs. However, drug repurposing can be successfully utilized in the discovery and development of new drugs with novel and

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.93193*

**Conflict of interest**

with integrated approaches between computational and experimental methods to ensure high success rates of repositioned drugs. However, drug repurposing can be successfully utilized in the discovery and development of new drugs with novel and effective therapeutic indications for human diseases.
