Integrative Omics for Informed Drug Repurposing: Targeting CNS Disorders

The treatment of CNS disorders, and in particular psychiatric illnesses, lacks disease-altering therapeutics for many conditions. This is likely due to regulatory challenges involving the high cost and slow-pace of drug development for CNS disorders as well as due to limited understanding of disease causality. Repurposing drugs for new indications have lower cost and shorter development timeline compared to that of de novo drug development. Historically, empirical drug-repurposing is a standard practice in psychiatry; however, recent advances in characterizing molecules with their structural and transcriptomic signatures along with ensemble of data analysis approaches, provides informed and cost-effective repurposing strategies that ameliorate the regulatory challenges. In addition, the potential to incorporate ontological approaches along with signature-based repurposing techniques addresses the various knowledge-based challenges associated with CNS drug development. In this review we primarily discuss signature-based in silico approaches to drug repurposing, and its integration with data science platforms for evidence-based drug repurposing. We contrast various in silico and empirical approaches and discuss possible avenues to improve the clinical relevance. These concepts provide a promising new translational avenue for developing new therapies for difficult to treat disorders, and offer the possibility of connecting drug discovery platforms and big data analytics with personalized disease signatures.