Drug Repurposing Using FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) Database

Abstract

Drug repurposing is an emerging approach to reassigning existing pre-approved therapies for new indications. The FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) is a large database of over 28 million adverse event reports submitted by medical providers, patients, and drug manufacturers and provides extensive drug safety signal data. In this review, four common drug repurposing strategies using FAERS are described, including inverse signal detection for a single disease, drug-drug interactions that mitigate a target ADE, identifying drug-ADE pairs with opposing gene perturbation signatures and identifying drug-drug pairs with congruent gene perturbation signatures. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of these different approaches to FAERS-based drug repurposing using existing successful applications in the literature. With the fast expansion of adverse drug event reports, FAERS-based drug repurposing represents a versatile and promising strategy for discovering new uses for existing therapies.