The Drug Repurposing Hub: a next-generation drug library and information resource Steven M. Corsello 1,2,3 , Joshua A. Bittker 1 , Zihan Liu 1 , Joshua Gould 1 , Patrick McCarren 1 , Jodi E. Hirschman 1 , Stephen E. Johnston 1 , Anita Vrcic 1 , Bang Wong 1 , Mariya Khan 1 , Jacob Asiedu 1 , Rajiv Narayan 1 , Christopher C. Mader 1 , Aravind Subramanian 1 , and Todd R. Golub 1,3,4,5,* 1 Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 2 Department of Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, USA 3 Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA 4 Department of Pediatric Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, USA 5 Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Maryland, USA Drug repurposing, the application of an existing therapeutic to a new disease indication, holds the promise of rapid clinical impact at a lower cost than de novo drug development. To date there has not been a systematic effort to identify such opportunities, limited in part by the lack of a comprehensive library of clinical compounds suitable for testing. To address this challenge, we hand-curated a collection of 4,707 compounds, experimentally confirmed their identity, and annotated them with literature-reported targets. The collection includes 3,422 drugs that are marketed around the world or that have been tested in human clinical trials. Compounds were obtained from more than 50 chemical vendors and the purity of each sample was established. We have thus established a blueprint for others to easily assemble such a repurposing library, and we have created an online Drug Repurposing Hub (www.broadinstitute.org/repurposing) containing detailed annotation for each of the compounds. Repurposing is attractive and pragmatic given the substantial cost and time requirements— on average, a decade or more— for drug development 1 . In addition, a large number of potential drugs never reach clinical testing. Moreover, fewer than 15% of compounds that enter clinical development ultimately receive approval despite the majority of them being deemed safe 2 . For either approved or failed drugs for which safety has already been * golub@broadinstitute.org. Author contributions S.M.C. and T.R.G. conceived the project, designed experiments, and wrote the paper with input from co-authors; A.V., S.E.J., P.M. and J.A.B. performed analytical chemistry and compound management activities; P.M., J.A.B., and S.M.C. performed chemical structure analysis; S.M.C., Z.L., J.E.H, R.N., and C.C.M. annotated drug properties; B.W. and M.K. designed the Drug Repurposing Hub web portal interface and assisted with manuscript figures; J.G., J.A. and A.S. designed and implemented the Hub database, interactive web platform, and data API. Competing financial interests The authors declare no competing financial interests. HHS Public Access Author manuscript Nat Med. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2017 August 23. Published in final edited form as: Nat Med. 2017 April 07; 23(4): 405–408. doi:10.1038/nm.4306. Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript