Drug Repurposing for Retinoblastoma: Recent Advances

Abstract

Retinoblastoma is the intraocular malignancy that occurs during early childhood. The current standard of care includes chemotherapy followed by focal consolidative therapies, and enucleation. Unfortunately, these are associated with many side and late effects. New drugs and/or drug combinations need to be developed for safe and effective treatment. This compelling need stimulated efforts to explore drug repurposing for retinoblastoma. While conventional drug development is a lengthy and expensive process, drug repurposing is a faster, alternate approach, where an existing drug, not meant for treating cancer, can be repurposed to treat retinoblastoma. The present article reviews various attempts to test drugs approved for different purposes such as calcium channels blockers, non-steroidal antiinflammatory drugs, cardenolides, antidiabetic, antibiotics and antimalarial for treating retinoblastoma. It also discusses other promising candidates that could be explored for repurposing for retinoblastoma.

Repurposing clinical drugs is a promising strategy to discover drugs against Zika virus infection

“…It focuses on US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs, as these drugs have details on potential toxicity, formulation, and pharmacology and drug-like molecules with potential activity [23]. This strategy will address most of the costs and time-consuming hurdles that accompany the drug development process [24]. This approach offers significant achievements to quickly determine ZIKV inhibitors [25,26].…”

Exploring the new horizons of drug repurposing: A vital tool for turning hard work into smart work

“…The usual drug development process may delay the translation of discovery from bench to bedside. This alternate approach overcomes most of the cost and time-consuming hurdles during the drug development process [15]. Drug repurposing was initiated with expanding interest from pharmaceutical organizations and the recognizable proof of different cheminformatics and bioinformatics findings [16].…”