Drug repurposing, which involves reevaluating existing drugs for new medical uses, offers a quicker, cost-effective route to treatment, with about 30% of FDA-approved drugs being repurposed for additional indications. Despite its potential, the practice faces challenges due to fragmented resources that complicate the repurposing process for specific diseases.
Recognizing these obstacles, the REMEDi4ALL consortium initiated a collaborative effort to evaluate and catalogue in-silico drug repurposing tools, aiming to enhance their utility across the drug repurposing community.
In the comprehensive review now published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, the consortium first surveyed and catalogued in-silico resources for drug repurposing, including a range of web-tools, open access databases and prediction methods (AI-based tools).
Next, based on the survey results and categorising, experts from the REMEDi4ALL consortium and beyond evaluated these resources to provide a shortlist of the most effective and useful in-silico drug repurposing resources for the community.
Finally, the consortium demonstrated the applicability of these tools in real-world REMEDi4ALL drug repurposing case studies on SARS-CoV-2, pancreatic cancer and a rare disease called multiple sulfatase deficiency.
As an important outcome of the survey and expert evaluation work, these resources have been collated in an Open access online REMEDi4ALL in-silico drug repurposing catalogue. The development of this web-catalogue and survey has been led by Tero Aittokallio and Ziaurrehman Tanoli from FIMM, alongside an expert panel within the REMEDi4ALL consortium and scientists across Europe.
The creation of this catalogue is a critical contribution to the drug repurposing space. This catalogue not only details important and relevant resources for individuals working on drug repurposing, but it also provides and entry point for individuals looking to establish the potential of their repurposing candidate using free-to-access online tools and databases. The catalogue provides a guide to researchers involved in drug repurposing and discovery, regardless of their level of computational expertise.
“We believe this in-silico repurposing resource web-catalogue will become of tremendous relevance to many drug development scientists — in all phases of R&D — who themselves are not and do not have the time to become cutting edge computational scientists”, says the corresponding author, Professor Tero Aittokallio from FIMM.
This article has been modified from a more extensive summary published on the REMEDi4ALL website. REMEDi4ALL is an EU-funded research initiative, which aims to advance the repurposing of medicines across Europe, leveraging a wide network of expertise to address the complexities of drug repurposing.
Original publication:
Tanoli, Z., Fernández-Torras, A., Özcan, U.O. et al. Computational drug repurposing: approaches, evaluation of in silico resources and case studies. Nat Rev Drug Discov (2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41573-025-01164-x