The Drug Repurposing Encyclopedia (DRE): a web server for systematic drug repurposing across 20 organisms

ABSTRACT The identification of new therapeutic uses for compounds via computational or experimental approaches, which is widely known as drug repurposing, has the potential to develop novel therapies with pre-existing medicines, thereby reducing the time and costs associated with drug development. Today, several data-driven methodologies have been developed leading to databases that facilitate drug repurposing initiatives. However, no approach has systematically compared drug transcriptional profiles to those from a wide spectrum of human diseases or molecular pathways. Here, we present the Drug Repurposing Encyclopedia (DRE, https://www.drugrep.org), an interactive web server covering over 198M significant drug-signature associations across 20 organisms to allow users to carry out drug-repositioning analyses. DRE consists of 12 modules covering real-time drug-repurposing for user-provided transcriptional signatures; gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) for all available drug transcriptomics profiles; as well as similarity analyses for provided gene sets across all database signatures. Collectively, DRE provides a one-stop comprehensive solution to help scientists interested in drug-repurposing studies.