Drug Repurposing: Clinical Practices and Regulatory Pathways

Drug repurposing involves finding new uses for existing drugs, offering potential benefits like faster development and lower costs due to established safety profiles. While it can address unmet medical needs, challenges include ensuring specificity for new indications, safety, and ethical concerns such as equitable access and informed consent. Recent advancements in AI, network pharmacology, and omics technologies aid in this process, with clinical trials and regulatory support facilitating drug approval. However, issues like intellectual property, trial design, and funding remain, alongside ethical challenges like patient autonomy and conflicts of interest. Future directions focus on precision medicine and global collaboration, highlighting the need for careful consideration of complexities and ethical implications to maximize benefits and minimize risks.