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How is molecular barcoding recycling non-cancer drugs to treat cancer?

Written by Balkees Abderrahman (University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, TX, USA, and the University of Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK)

The medical and pharmaceutical community has been laser-focused on researching and developing new therapeutics for cancer, what’s known as the ‘de novo’ drug discovery process, when, in fact, existing non-cancer drugs can be repurposed to fight cancer.Drug repurposing – or repositioning or redirection – can accelerate patients’ access to beneficial therapeutics while reducing costs of drug development. In de novo drug discovery, time between discovery and clinical trials is 9 years on average, with a success rate of less than 10%, and an average cost per drug to the patient of several hundred million dollars [1]. By contrast, in drug repurposing,...

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