Network Pharmacology for Drug Repositioning in Anti-Alzheimer’s Drug Development

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has become a public health emergency due to its complexity and heterogeneity; therefore, therapeutic regimens must focus on cure rather than symptom management. Alternative strategies, such as repositioning existing drugs to treat AD, have been increasingly applied recently due to the sluggish pace and rising failure rate of traditional drug discovery. Reevaluating existing drugs for a new indication is known as “drug repositioning,” which may save money, time, and effort throughout the drug development process. Computational strategies have been providing excellent facilities for the effective prediction of drug repositioning, especially the integration of the network pharmacology method, which offers a novel approach to drug discovery by creating models that account for the broad physiological or pathophysiological context of protein targets and the effects of changing them without compromising the essential molecular details. Network pharmacology guides and assists drug repositioning by identifying new drug targets, disease mechanisms, multi-target drugs, drug combinations, and adverse drug reactions through the analysis and molecular visualization of multilayer omics data on the drug-target-disease association. This chapter discusses the importance and success of drug repositioning in AD development and the prospects and methodologies of network pharmacology in understanding various aspects of drug repositioning.