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The Drug Repurposing Hub: a next-generation drug library and information resource

Nature Medicine volume 23, pages 405–408 (2017)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

Drug repurposing, the application of an existing therapeutic to a new disease indication, holds promise of rapid clinical impact at a lower cost than de novo drug development. So far, there has not been a systematic effort to identify such opportunities, limited in part by the lack of a comprehensive library of clinical compounds suitable for testing. To address this challenge, we hand-curated a collection of 4,707 compounds, experimentally confirmed their identities, and annotated them with literature-reported targets. The collection includes 3,422 drugs that are marketed around the world or that have been tested in human clinical trials. Compounds were obtained from more than 50 chemical vendors, and the purity of each sample was established. We have thus established a blueprint for others to easily assemble such a repurposing library, and we have created an online Drug Repurposing Hub (http://www.broadinstitute.org/repurposing) that contains detailed annotation for each of the compounds.

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Figure 1: The Repurposing Hub workflow for drug-library creation.
Figure 2: Repurposing Library contents.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the members of the Broad Institute Compound Management team for their invaluable assistance. We also thank C. Yu, J. Boehm, N. Tolliday, J. Athanasopoulos, J. Rosains, S. Loranger, and A. Burgin for helpful scientific discussions. This work was supported in part by NIH LINCS Program grants 3U54 HG006093 (T.R.G. and A.S.), U54 HL127366 (T.R.G. and A.S.), and U54 HG008699 (T.R.G. and A.S.). Additional support was provided by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (T.R.G.), NIH training grant T32 CA009172 (S.M.C.), KL2/Catalyst Medical Research Investigator Training award from Harvard Catalyst/The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center (National Center for Research Resources and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health) Award KL2 TR001100 (S.M.C.), and the Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO Young Investigator Award (S.M.C.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Steven M Corsello, Joshua A Bittker, Zihan Liu, Joshua Gould, Patrick McCarren, Jodi E Hirschman, Stephen E Johnston, Anita Vrcic, Bang Wong, Mariya Khan, Jacob Asiedu, Rajiv Narayan, Christopher C Mader, Aravind Subramanian & Todd R Golub

  2. Department of Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Steven M Corsello

  3. Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Steven M Corsello & Todd R Golub

  4. Department of Pediatric Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Todd R Golub

  5. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Maryland, USA

    Todd R Golub

Authors
  1. Steven M Corsello
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  2. Joshua A Bittker
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  3. Zihan Liu
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  14. Aravind Subramanian
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  15. Todd R Golub
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Contributions

S.M.C. and T.R.G. conceived the project, designed experiments, and wrote the paper with input from coauthors; A.V., S.E.J., P.M., and J.A.B. performed analytical chemistry and compound management activities; P.M., J.A.B., and S.M.C. performed chemical-structure analysis; S.M.C., Z.L., J.E.H., R.N., and C.C.M. annotated drug properties; B.W. and M.K. designed the Drug Repurposing Hub web-portal interface and assisted with manuscript figures; J.G., J.A., and A.S. designed and implemented the hub database, interactive web platform, and data API.

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Correspondence to Todd R Golub.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Corsello, S., Bittker, J., Liu, Z. et al. The Drug Repurposing Hub: a next-generation drug library and information resource. Nat Med 23, 405–408 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.4306

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