Framework for identifying drug repurposing candidates from observational healthcare data

OBJECTIVE: Observational medical databases, such as electronic health records and insurance claims, track the healthcare trajectory of millions of individuals. These databases provide real-world longitudinal information on large cohorts of patients and their medication prescription history. We present an easy-to-customize framework that systematically analyzes such databases to identify new indications for on-market prescription drugs. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Our framework provides an interface for defining study design parameters and extracting patient cohorts, disease-related outcomes, and potential confounders in observational databases. It then applies causal inference methodology to emulate hundreds of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) for prescribed drugs, while adjusting for confounding and selection biases. After correcting for multiple testing, it outputs the estimated effects and their statistical significance in each database. RESULTS: We demonstrate the utility of the framework in a case study of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and evaluate the effect of 259 drugs on various PD progression measures in two observational medical databases, covering more than 150 million patients. The results of these emulated trials reveal remarkable agreement between the two databases for the most promising candidates. DISCUSSION: Estimating drug effects from observational data is challenging due to data biases and noise. To tackle this challenge, we integrate causal inference methodology with domain knowledge and compare the estimated effects in two separate databases. CONCLUSION: Our framework enables systematic search for drug repurposing candidates by emulating RCTs using observational data. The high level of agreement between separate databases strongly supports the identified effects.