Traditional drug development and discovery has not kept pace with threats from emerging and re-emerging diseases such as Ebola virus, MERS-CoV and more recently, SARS-CoV-2. Among other reasons, the exorbitant costs, high attrition rate and extensive periods of time from research to market approval are the primary contributing factors to the lag in recent traditional drug developmental activities. Due to these reasons, drug developers are starting to consider drug repurposing (or repositioning) as a viable alternative to the more traditional drug development process. Drug repurposing aims to find alternative uses of an approved or investigational drug outside of its original indication. The key advantages of this approach are that there is less developmental risk, and it is less time-consuming since the safety and pharmacological profile of the repurposed drug is already established. To that end, various approaches to drug repurposing are employed. Computational approaches make use of machine learning and algorithms to model disease and drug interaction, while experimental approaches involve a more traditional wet-lab experiments. This review would discuss in detail various ongoing drug repurposing strategies and approaches to combat the current COVID-19 pandemic, along with the advantages and the potential challenges.

传统的药物开发和发现跟不上埃博拉病毒、MERS-CoV 以及最近的 SARS-CoV-2 等新出现和重新出现的疾病的威胁。除其他原因外，过高的成本、高损耗率和从研究到上市批准的漫长时间是最近传统药物开发活动滞后的主要原因。由于这些原因，药物开发人员开始考虑将药物再利用（或重新定位）作为更传统的药物开发过程的可行替代方案。药物再利用旨在寻找已批准或正在研究的药物在其原始适应症之外的替代用途。这种方法的主要优点是开发风险较小，而且由于已经确定了重新利用药物的安全性和药理学特征，因此耗时更少。为此，采用了多种药物再利用方法。计算方法利用机器学习和算法来模拟疾病和药物相互作用，而实验方法涉及更传统的湿实验室实验。本综述将详细讨论各种正在进行的药物再利用策略和方法，以应对当前的 COVID-19 大流行，以及优势和潜在挑战。