On Aug. 17, 2011, Stanford/Packard scientists found new uses for existing drugs by mining gene-activity data banks.

When the scientists applied an ‘opposites attract’ algorithm to publicly available databases, surprising sparks flew: They found potential compatibilities between numerous existing drugs and diseases for which those drugs had never before been thought to be beneficial. The results were published in two separate studies (one each for the cimetidine and topiramate findings) in Science Translational Medicine.