Repurposing Drugs to Treat Heart and Brain Illness

Drug development is a complicated, slow and expensive process with high failure rates. One strategy to mitigate these factors is to recycle existing drugs with viable safety profiles and have gained Food and Drug Administration approval following extensive clinical trials. Cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases are difficult to treat, and there exist few effective therapeutics, necessitating the development of new, more efficacious drugs. Recent scientific studies have led to a mechanistic understanding of heart and brain disease progression, which has led researchers to assess myriad drugs for their potential as pharmacological treatments for these ailments. The focus of this review is to survey strategies for the selection of drug repurposing candidates and provide representative case studies where drug repurposing strategies were used to discover therapeutics for cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, with a focus on anti-inflammatory processes where new drug alternatives are needed.

Automated summary

Drug development is a complex, slow, and expensive process, but repurposing existing drugs with known safety profiles approved by the FDA for clinical trials can mitigate these challenges. Cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases pose significant treatment obstacles, necessitating the exploration of new drugs with better efficacy, guided by mechanistic insights into disease progression. Researchers are focusing on repurposing drugs for potential pharmacological treatments targeting inflammation in cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases.