For example, statins were designed to lower cholesterol but had the unintended effect of cutting cancer risk as well. Topamax was designed to fight epilepsy but has been found to cause weight loss and prevent migraines. Is there a field devoted to discovering unintended uses for pharmaceuticals, and what is it called?
Yes - repurposing.
Is there a name for the field of studying nouveau uses for pharmaceuticals
…College?
Damn. Beaten to the punchline.
Nice one! I’m still laughing!
It is kind of hard to just go out and purposely find new uses for all the drugs that are out there. It wouldn’t be very ethical or cost effective either to just randomly test different drugs against a huge list of conditions.
New uses get found out by:
-
Accident - a person with a rare condition is helped by taking a drug for something else. The finding may be written into the clinical literature.
-
Clinical word of mouth - doctors can prescribe drugs off-label for new uses and often do so if they think the evidence is fairly strong although unproven.
-
Statistics - this is probably more of what you are thinking of. Those studies are done by lots of different groups and they collect lots of information about drugs and their effects. A statistically significant difference in heart attacks for example between those taking a drug and not may trigger research that specifically looks into that possibility.
I don’t think there is one group that investigates additional uses for a drug. Rather, it is the clinical and research groups as a whole that tend to find those effects if they exist.
Repurposing doesn’t sound like an inexact science in the 21st century though, but before this century yeah it would’ve been an inexact science. If you understand the underlying biochemistry of a disorder and the biochemistry of pharmaceuticals you can then use drugs for novel purposes to treat that disorder. For example it was ‘discovered’ that wellbutrin leads to weight loss but wellbutrin is a dopamine/norepinephrine agonist. The biochemistry of obesity shows that dopamine/norepinephrine agonists lead to appetite suppression so it wasn’t an accident that wellbutrin became a diet drug, it was an understanding of biochemistry that made it happen.
Big pharma companies spend lots of money trying to find new uses for their current drugs. It can really mean hitting the jackpot for them, they can sell their drug for a whole new indication to a whole cohort of people who never used it before, without having to go through the huge expense of developing a new drug.
(One of the results of the Vioxx situation was that several studies looking at a potential use for drugs like it (Cox-2 inhibitors) in the treatment of dementia were suspended.)
Depending on the situation safety studies could be much easier for the company. They might have a huge chunk of data showing thousands of patients had been taking their drug for years with few ill effects. Eliminating or shortening such studies removes a huge cost for the drug companies.
Does a new use extend the drug’s patent life?
I don’t know if it extends the patent life of the effective ingredient. However drug companies have several tricks to keep drug prices high. They will create an ‘extended release’ version of a drug or they will find a new use for it. For exmaple wellbutrin became the anti-smoking drug zyban and now zyban costs about and prozac became the PMS fighting drug Sarafem
I think it does, for the new use at least - I think, for instance, that Proscar is in generic but Propecia is still patented, even though they’re both finasteride. There’s plenty of other drugs that have been repurposed under new names.
The OP seems to be under the misapprehension that this would be a simple matter, when in reality many drug candidates don’t end up activating the pathways they’re supposed to, or screwing around with one part of one pathway doesn’t have the expected results in terms of actual treatment. Even repurposing would be inexact in the way all drug development is. One funny thing is that a number of times drugs have been developed with the purpose of activating one pathway or blocking one receptor, and the drugs worked excellently, but through an unknown mechanism - the drug didn’t do anything to the initial target. Look at Zetia, for instance - it’s a cholesterol drug, but they still don’t know why it works.
Even for repurposing, the biochemical basis of disease is incredibly complex. Manipulating one chemical may work, or it may not do anything, or it may cause unexpected effects. These are not simple matters.