Tooluniverse Drug Repurposing

This is a structured workflow for finding new uses for existing drugs. It walks you through three strategies: target-based (disease gene to drug lookup), compound-based (drug to new indication), and disease-driven (disease to target to drug). The workflow is opinionated about reasoning first before running searches, includes a scoring rubric that weighs genetic evidence and safety profiles, and comes with specific tool call patterns for OpenTargets, DrugBank, DGIdb, and clinical trial databases. Most useful when you're hypothesis-generating for rare diseases or need to systematically evaluate repurposing candidates with a consistent evidence framework. The documentation is thorough about parameter names and response paths, which matters since these APIs aren't always intuitive.

skills.sh installs: 400
GitHub stars: 1.8K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add mims-harvard/tooluniverse --skill tooluniverse-drug-repurposing --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Drug Repurposing with ToolUniverse

Systematically identify and evaluate drug repurposing candidates using multiple computational strategies.

IMPORTANT: Always use English terms in tool calls. Respond in the user's language.

Reasoning Before Searching

Start by asking: WHY might this drug work for a new disease? Three strategies:

(a) Same target: The drug's primary target is also involved in the new disease. This is the strongest hypothesis — use OpenTargets to check if the target has genetic evidence in both diseases before any other search.
(b) Off-target activity: The drug has secondary targets or off-target effects that are relevant to the new disease. Check ChEMBL bioactivity data for all known targets of the drug, not just its primary one.
(c) Shared pathways: The original indication and new disease share molecular pathways, even if the target itself is not genetically linked. Use Reactome and STRING to compare pathway overlap between diseases.

SKILL.md on GitHub

Details

Repository: github.com/mims-harvard/tooluniverse
Category: Data Science & ML
First seen: Jun 3, 2026