Computational drug repositioning for cancer therapeutics

Due to ever-increasing failure rates, high cost, unsatisfactory safety profile, and limited efficacy associated with anticancer drug development, the repositioning of established non-cancer drugs for new oncology indications has emerged as an increasingly attractive approach to addressing the unmet cancer-related medical need. With the rapid development of bioinformatics, chemoinformatics as well as high-performance computing, drug repositioning is becoming more intentional than ever, and a significant surge of computational approaches has been well established to greatly facilitate drug repositioning for cancer treatment. In this review, we provide a brief overview of recent advances in the computational drug repositioning for anticancer applications with a specific emphasis on repositioning of non-cancer drugs by use of various computational approaches.