On Giving Drugs a New Life With the Help of Data

Developing a drug for a specific condition (what we know with the name of “de novo” drug discovery) is a tremendously costly task in terms of money, time, and risks. An alternative to de novo drug discovery is drug repurposing, which tries to identify other uses for drugs that already exist. This way, we can skip some of the phases of developing a drug, being more efficient and reducing the investment. Although this process used to occur by chance in the beginning, nowadays we can target drug repurposing. 
How could we benefit from data-driven and computational methodologies to approach drug repurposing? What is the relevance of the phenotypic and genetic features of diseases in these processes? Which specific diseases can be studied under these strategies? Are biological pathways or biological sequences important for drug repurposing? How can artificial intelligence and representing data in the form of graphs contribute to this task? Are both genders equally benefited from drug repurposing? 
These are some of the matters that will be discussed in this seminar, where we aim to give a general overview on some of the trends and new horizons that are being explored in the context of drug repurposing.

You can follow the event here

Speakers: Belén Otero Carrasco (Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University; Centro de Tecnología Biomédica y ETS Ingenieros Informáticos, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) & Lucía Prieto Santamaría (Center for Complex Network Research, Physics Department, College of Science, Northeastern University;Centro de Tecnología Biomédica y ETS Ingenieros Informáticos, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)

Sponsors: RCCHU; Harvard University; UPM