Drug Repurposing (DR) is an alternative to the traditional drug discovery process. It is cost and time effective,with high returns and low-risk process that can tackle the increasing need for interventions for varied diseases and new outbreaks. Repurposing of old drugs for other diseases has gained wider attention, as there have been several old drugs approved by the FDA for new diseases. In the global emergency of COVID-19 pandemic, this is one of the strategies implemented in the repurposing of old anti-infective, anti-rheumatic and anti-thrombotic drugs. The goal of the current review is to elaborate the process of DR, its advantages, repurposed drugs for a plethora of disorders, and the evolution of related academic publications. Further, detailed are the computational approaches: literature mining and semantic inference, network-based drug repositioning, signature matching, retrospective clinical analysis, molecular docking and experimental phenotypic screening. We discuss the legal and economic potential barriers in DR, existent collaborative models and recommendations for overcoming these hurdles and leveraging the complete potential of DR in finding new indications.

药物再利用（DR）是传统药物发现过程的替代方法。它具有成本效益和时间效益，并且具有高回报率和低风险的流程，可以解决对各种疾病和新疾病爆发的干预措施的日益增长的需求。重新使用旧药物治疗其他疾病已引起广泛关注，因为FDA已批准了几种用于新疾病的旧药物。在全球发生COVID-19大流行的紧急情况中，这是重新使用旧的抗感染，抗风湿和抗血栓形成药物的策略之一。当前审查的目的是详细阐述DR的过程，其优势，用于多种疾病的改用药物以及相关学术出版物的发展。此外，还详细介绍了计算方法：文献挖掘和语义推断，基于网络的药物重新定位，签名匹配，回顾性临床分析，分子对接和实验表型筛选。我们讨论了DR的法律和经济潜在障碍，现有的协作模型和建议，以克服这些障碍并利用DR的全部潜力来寻找新的适应症。