Advances in Drug Repurposing to Overcome Cancers

Dear Colleagues,

The mortality rate of cancers is very high, mainly due to drug resistance. But there are some drawbacks to drug development, so we here present a better strategy, known as drug repurposing.

Due to the slow pace of the discovery of new drugs, accompanied by increasing costs and a high risk of attrition, the idea of reusing “known” drugs and molecules becomes very appealing. However, although multiple strategies have been proposed for the efficient, safe, and economic implementation of drug repurposing into therapies for both common and rare diseases, many obstacles have preventing them from benefiting patients. Today, we witness exponential research progress in fields that could propel drug repurposing, including the development of in vitro pharmacological profiling connected with multi-omics approaches, single-cell sequencing, as well as the dramatic expansion of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. These advances are accompanied by unlimited increases in publicly available datasets obtained during clinical or biomedical projects. Although all these breakthroughs could improve both the safety and efficiency of future drug repurposing strategies, they are also accompanied by specific challenges, some of which we are not aware of yet.

Thus, for this Special Issue, we welcome the submission of both experimental and review manuscripts relating to all aspects of modern drug repurposing, but especially ones which attempt to address future progress in this field and define related obstacles.

Dr. Rafal Bartoszewski
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cancers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.