What’s the News: For all the testing we do, drugs are still mysterious things—they can activate pathways we never connected with them or twiddle the dials in some far-off part of the body. To see if drugs already FDA-approved for certain diseases could be used to treat other conditions, scientists lined up two online databases and discovered two drugs that, when tested in mice, worked against diseases they’d never been meant for, suggesting that mining of such information could be a fertile strategy for finding new treatments.

How the Heck:

The two databases the team used were collections of information about how genes were activated or deactivated in human cells both when drugs were taken (the Connectivity Map) and when certain diseases were present (Gene Expression Omnibus).
The researchers fed the data into software that connected a disease with a high level of activity from one gene with a drug that tamped that gene’s activity down. In this way, they identified candidates for follow up in the lab: epilepsy drug topiramate was paired with inflammatory bowel disease, and heartburn drug cimetidine with a kind of lung cancer.
The team treated mouse models of these ...