The pharmaceutical industry, in some ways, has it tough. To take a drug from discovery to market takes on average 13.5 years and more than US$2 billion. But to take an existing, marketed drug and repurpose it for a new indication (remember, sildenafil was originally approved to treat angina) costs far less, and takes considerably less time.

The advent of “big data” (1) – in this case, the combination of electronic medical records (EMRs) and large amounts of processing power – has yielded Big Pharma a relatively inexpensive method of mining for drugs that might be worth further evaluation for a new application. And it looks like this approach has identified an existing drug that appears to be protective against AMD – both wet and dry (2). The drug? The antiparkinsonian agent, L-DOPA.

To be fair, this work wasn’t entirely done using brute-force processing power to interrogate a big EMR dataset for as many correlations as possible: the researchers from the University of Arizona who did the data mining already had an idea of where to look – having previously discovered a G protein-coupled receptor that L-DOPA binds and activates: GPR143 (3). Expressed in the retinal pigment epithelium, they found that GPR143 activation by L-DOPA increases the expression of a potent anti-angiogenic factor, pigment epithelium-derived factor (PEDF), and decreases the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF).