We were interested to read the authors’ comments our recent paper in Brain (Halliday et al., 2017). We agree that carefully designed phase II and phase III trials would be needed to test the efficacy of trazodone as a treatment for neurodegeneration before use in human patients. However, it is also important to not underestimate the, potentially very significant, savings in both time and money that repurposing allows by skipping not only phase I trials, but also the arduous preclinical biochemistry, pharmacology, toxicology and medicinal chemistry needed for novel lead compounds. Hence, we do not feel we have overstated the potential of drug repurposing: there is an excellent premise for this in cancer, pain and other areas