Considerations and challenges for sex-aware drug repurposing

Abstract

Highlights Genetic, epigenetic, hormonal, immunological, metabolic, and environmental factors affect sex-biased drug responses. Drug repurposing approaches provide a significant advantage over novel drug development by reducing lengthy and costly clinical trials. Advances in compute processing power and optimized algorithms for computational systems have increased the efficiency and feasibility of computational drug repurposing. Multiple challenges still need to be addressed for sex-aware drug repurposing, including the insufficient understanding of the cause of variation of drug responses due to sex differences, better performing sex-aware repurposing methods, and the lack of large and balanced datasets to develop improved methods. Future low-dimensional representations of molecular association and network approaches could significantly impact the field of sex-aware drug repurposing.

Keywords

• Sex differences
• Drug repurposing
• Sex-bias
• Sex-aware
• Review
• Therapeutics