Worming our way to Alzheimer's disease drug discovery

摘要

Although numerous promising novel drugs remain in the pipeline, the time taken to establish safety profiles, approve these novel drug candidates, and get them out into the market runs nearly a decade. Unfortunately, time is not a luxury that patients with AD have. A promising approach is to revisit and screen FDA-approved drugs for a different disease. A very good example of such a candidate drug is bexarotene. Bexarotene has been approved by the FDA for treatment of cutaneous T-cell lym-phoma. However recent work by Cramer et al. showed that bexarotene is quite effective in ameliorating symptoms of AD in a rodent model (1). Studies further characterizing the mechanism of action of bexarotene in AD are underway. But, because this drug is already FDA approved, its safety and toxicity profiles are already known. Repurposing of such drugs allows us to bypass cost and time hurdles in bringing the drug to the market.