What Is Medicine and Drug Repositioning? | Doorstep Pharmacy

Over the many decades since the early development of first aid, the first aid kit contents lists have constantly changed as new medicines are discovered and the side effects of other medications have given people pause about using them as an over-the-counter medication.

This is the nature of medical research; doctors and researchers constantly study both new and existing compounds to see how they work, what side effects they have and which dosages are the most appropriate.

Most of the time, these studies and research confirm or clarify a particular idea the doctors already had, but in some cases, medicines can be found to have a surprising hidden benefit, one that makes them more useful and versatile as a medication.

This concept is known as medicine repositioning and it has been used to help treat rare and devastating diseases, help with conditions deemed incurable and has become a critical part of psychiatry to find medicines that can help treat severe mental health disorders.

The reason why it is so commonly used is that a medicine that is already a known commodity and has undergone clinical trials can be prescribed faster, as the early stages of clinical trials to prove its safety have already been done.

Medicine repositioning often finds success in failure and life-saving treatments from those that have done exceptional harm. Here are some of the most notable stories.

Sildenafil

The one medicine repositioning story that comes to mind when people think of the concept is almost certainly the proposed angina medication sildenafil.

Discovered by Pfizer in the mid-1980s, the drug appeared to be a failed experiment, as early trials suggested it was not terribly effective for angina. However, it had one very noticeable side effect that was considered to be of significant interest.

Sildenafil would, after further testing, approval and a long marketing campaign, become the men’s health medication Viagra, and changed how sexual health was treated in the process.

Thalidomide

A drug initially available over the counter to treat morning sickness, thalidomide was the cause of one of the greatest man-made medical disasters in history, as it caused serious and significant birth defects, leading to a global ban by the 1960s.

However, in 1964, Israeli doctor Jacob Sheskin decided to use thalidomide to treat a person who was dying of a particularly painful complication of leprosy.

It worked, and for over three decades it was used off-label albeit strictly controlled as a way to treat leprosy. Whilst it is no longer a first-line treatment given that clofazimine does not have the major side effects, it has saved countless lives from a particularly painful condition.

Ketamine

Whilst the dissociative psychedelic drug ketamine is used as an anaesthetic drug, it is more commonly known as a recreational drug formerly associated with club culture due to its fast-acting ability to bring people into a dissociative state.

In recent years, however, ketamine has been proposed and indeed used as a potential treatment for depression, as research suggests it can provide relief from major treatment-resistant depression symptoms in as little as an hour, although in practice it typically takes several sessions.