Drug Repurposing and Reformulation for Cancer Treatment: 2nd Edition
A special issue of Cancers (ISSN 2072-6694). This special issue belongs to the section "Cancer Drug Development".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 June 2025 | Viewed by 4319
Special Issue Editors
Interests: leukemia; melanoma; target identification and validation; experimental therapeutics; animal models; preclinical drug development; translational oncology research
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: synthesis; chemopreventive agent; chemotherapeutic agent; environmental carcinogens; in vitro and in vivo studies; leukemia; melanoma; colon cancer
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: drug repurposing; nanomedicine; bladder cancer; leukemia; infectious diseases; ionic liquids
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Cancer is responsible for the second-highest number of deaths worldwide, and efforts to combat this global health problem have led to numerous discoveries, altering the paradigms of cancer therapy and improving the life expectancy of cancer patients. Despite these advances, several cancers still have poor prognoses and a dismal 5-year survival rate. The traditional drug discovery and development path is time consuming (12–15 years) and incurs exorbitant costs (~2–3 billion USD), with less than 5% of new chemical entities from drug discovery programs reaching beyond the phase I stage of clinical trials. Thus, there is a dire need for a strategy capable of minimizing the cost and duration of drug development, improving the success rate.
Drug repurposing is a drug development strategy that focuses on establishing new therapeutic indications for FDA-approved or previously discarded drugs. The availability of pharmacokinetic, tolerability and toxicological profiles of the drug considered for repurposing is a major advantage, able to accentuate the clinical translation of the repurposed drug with a concomitant reduction in the development time and cost. While drug repurposing is not new in the medical field, including cancer therapy, it received great impetus when the retrospective analysis of clinical data in cancer patients revealed that low-cost, off-patent, and FDA-approved non-oncology drugs such as metformin can be useful for cancer prevention and therapy, and the repurposing and reformulation of drugs is actively being pursued globally for the treatment of various cancers, with numerous clinical trials having been initiated to facilitate the translation of repurposed drugs for cancer therapy.
We are pleased to invite you to submit original contributions and/or reviews highlighting the potential of FDA-approved or previously discarded drugs in curbing cancer initiation, progression, and/or metastasis, and drug resistance. We also welcome contributions concerning the development of repurposed drug delivery systems to improve their bioavailability and/or targeting to augment therapeutic outcomes in various cancers. We will consider contributions demonstrating in vitro and/or in vivo preclinical evidence of drug repurposing and/or reformulation for cancer therapy, and encourage contributions focusing on the exploration of repurposed drugs as an adjunct to standard chemo- and/or radiotherapy.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Arati Sharma
Prof. Dr. Dhimant Desai
Dr. Abhijit Date
Guest Editors
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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.
Keywords
- drug repurposing
- cancer
- drug resistance
- metastasis
- drug delivery
- liposomes
- nanoparticles
- bioavailability
- drug targeting
- reformulation
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