New uses for existing drugs

Discovery of new uses for existing drugs, including those uses discovered as in point 5 above. 

Ashbum, T.T. and Thor, K.B. 2004. Drug repositioning identifying and developing new uses for existing drugs. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 3(8) 673—683. 

The Prous Institute for Biomedical Research is developing a computational method based on a wide range of molecular descriptors and binding profiles, called BioEpisteme , which is claimed to facilitate the discovery of new medicines and new uses for existing drugs. Pre-requisites of the BioEpisteme approach are quite close to the PASS concept A drug may interact with multiple targets and produce more than one therapeutic response and/or... 

It is important to acknowledge that as we acquire additional experience with known drugs, new uses for existing agents are often identified. For example, it has recently been shown that the combination of the antibacterial antibiotic clindamycin (used clinically for years for its relatively... 

Berndt, Cockburn, and Grepin (2005) employ the number of medical indications to measure pharmaceutical innovation. A substantial share of industry research and development expenditures, estimated at between 25% and 30% (p. 45), is directed toward finding new indications for existing products. Berndt et al. use the term incremental innovation to describe these efforts. For the three therapeutic areas they examined, the number of FDA approvals for new indications increased substantially in the past decade (p. 27). In addition, the greater number of approved indications has led to increased utilizations of the drugs concerned (p. 41). On that basis, they maintain that reported declines in pharmaceutical research productivity are overstated. 

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