Drug Repurposing for the Development of Novel Analgesics

Drug development consumes huge amounts of time and money and the search for novel analgesics, which are urgently required, is particularly difficult, having resulted in many setbacks in the past. Drug repurposing – the identification of new uses for existing drugs – is an alternative approach, which bypasses most of the time- and cost-consuming components of drug development. Recent, unexpected findings suggest a role for several existing drugs, such as minocycline, ceftriaxone, sivelestat, and pioglitazone, as novel analgesics in chronic and neuropathic pain states. Here, we discuss these findings as well as their proposed antihyperalgesic mechanisms and outline the merits of pathway-based repurposing screens, in combination with bioinformatics and novel cellular reprogramming techniques, for the identification of novel analgesics.

TrendsThe search for novel analgesics is particularly arduous and has encountered many setbacks in the past. In Phase II clinical studies, approximately 50–60% of potential substances fail because of lack of efficacy and a further 25% because of safety issues.Drug repurposing represents an alternative to time- and money-intensive de novo drug development, because a repurposed drug can be considered safe in the clinical setting.Recent findings suggest the potential for several widely used drugs to be employed as novel analgesics, among them, antibiotics, antidiabetic compounds, and phosphodiesterase inhibitors.Pathway-based repurposing screens may identify more drugs with analgesic properties that may be repurposed as novel analgesics.