Reshaping the Therapeutic Landscape: Drug Repurposing for Emerging Infectious Diseases and Rare Diseases

The National Institutes of Health’s Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center (GARD) estimates over 7000 rare diseases. The most prominent rare diseases include alkaptonuria, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, neurofibromatosis, and hereditary angioedema. Patients with rare diseases frequently experience significant challenges getting a prompt and correct diagnosis, getting appropriate treatments, and acquiring support from the healthcare system due to the small patient populations and limited understanding of these diseases. Emerging infections are diseases that have already existed but have multiplied in occurrence or geographical extent. These emerging infectious diseases include COVID-19, influenza, Ebola, and hepatitis. Drug resistance is also becoming a significant problem in managing these emerging infectious diseases. Drug repurposing, often referred to as drug reuse, has become a potential method for finding new drugs to treat emerging infectious diseases and rare diseases. Repurposing current drugs can considerably reduce the time and expense involved with conventional drug development while also bringing much-needed cures for rare diseases that do not have existing effective treatments. In the case of emerging infections, repurposing may help find a solution for resistance development. This chapter initially discussed a brief overview of drug repurposing and approaches used for repurposing, focusing on computational methods. Later, we explained the recent approaches and case studies related to repurposing for treating emerging infectious diseases and rare diseases.