Treatment Repurposing using Literature-related Discovery

This article describes the Literature-Related Discovery technique and its application to Treatment Repurposing (which includes, but goes well beyond, Drug Repurposing). Illustrative results of potential repurposed treatments were shown from a study on preventing and reversing Alzheimer’s disease. The detailed query used to generate these results is presented. The approach has the potential to identify voluminous amounts of candidate treatments for repurposing. Additionally, a broad review of the Drug Repurposing literature is provided. A Drug Repurposing database is retrieved and the structure and content are analyzed using Text Clustering and Factor Analysis. Two taxonomies of the Drug Repurposing literature are presented and specific major themes are shown.