Predicting New Target Conditions for Drug Retesting Using Temporal Patterns in Clinical Trials: A Proof of Concept

Drug discovery is costly and time-consuming. Efficient drug repurposing promises to accelerate drug discovery with reduced cost. However, most successful repurposing cases so far have been achieved by serendipity. There is a need for more efficient computational methods for predicting new indications for existing drugs. This paper conducts a retrospective analysis of the temporal patterns of drug intervention trials for every drug in a pair of different conditions in ClinicalTrials.gov, including 550 drugs used for 451 conditions between 2003 and 2013. We found that drugs are often targeted towards conditions that are related by similar or identical eligibility criteria. We demonstrated the preliminary feasibility of predicting new target conditions for drug retesting among conditions with similar aggregated clinical trial eligibility criteria and confirmed this hypothesis using evidence from the literature.