Drug repurposing: re-inventing therapies for cancer without re-entering the development pipeline-a review.

While majority of the current treatment approaches for cancer remain expensive and are associated with several side effects, development of new treatment modalities takes a significant period of research, time, and expenditure. An alternative novel approach is drug repurposing that focuses on finding new applications for the previously clinically approved drugs. The process of drug repurposing has also been facilitated by current advances in the field of proteomics, genomics, and information computational biology.