Abstract
Identification of novel low molecular weight compounds with antitumor activity is the first important step towards the development of candidate drugs and a popular trend in in vitro pharmacology. The aim of the study was to assess the key trends and rank the scientific priorities in anticancer drug design using bibliometric analysis. The protocol involved using the panel of bibliographic databases (PubMed, Scopus, Cortellis) and analytical web-based tools PubChem, FACTA +, ClustVis, Reaxys, PathwayStudio and VOSviewer software to review a sample of 1657 papers issued 2020–2021.The work was also focused on 70 new promising basic structures and derivatives targeted at inhibiting both individual pro-tumor proteins and signaling cascades. It was found that serine-threonine protein kinases, receptor tyrosine kinases, DNA topoisomerases and tubulins as well as signaling pathways PI3K, mTOR, AKT1, STAT3, HIF-1a, and p53 account for up to 60% of the total structure of cellular targets for the design of anticancer drugs. The increasing scientific interest in innovative inhibitors of tumor-associated protein complexes, transcription factors and metabolic enzymes has been found. The compounds, which belong to heterocycles, glycosides, quinones and terpenes, were mentioned in 71% of papers as the basic structures for antitumor derivatives design. Papers, published in 2019, in which the compounds, such as lapachone, luteolin, quercetin, monastrol, and crisosplenol D are studied in the context of the design of new drug prototypes, have the highest citation rate. The systematic bibliometric approach involving the use of a panel of analytical resources makes it possible to assess R&D trends and scientific priorities in anticancer drug design, thus organically complementing the classic reviews in periodicals.
Highlights
One of the evidence-based approaches to the drug discovery consists in design of molecules, which possess the desired properties and affect the cancer-related proteins [2,3,4]
Defining the mechanism of action of anticancer drug prototypes and the whole range of on-target and off-target proteins is essential for design of the highly selective drugs with minimal side effects
It should be noted that the review papers are focused mostly on systematizing the data on the anticancer drug prototypes, either belonging to a certain chemical taxon, or a spectrum of synthesized derivatives with the same chemical scaffold
Summary
The search for current trends in drug prototypes, together with the interpretation of medical and biological effects of various anticancer compounds, results in the need for prompt data analysis from the multiple literature and biomedical sources. The application of the bibliometric analysis with adapted algorithms for creating an up-to-date "analytical portrait", which includes a more diversified repertoire of research data on drug prototypes and their molecular targets, has proved to be effective in defining the current trends in molecular oncology and pharmacology [10,11,12,13]. Resources enable extracting the links between different molecular entities from biomedical data containing in twenty million abstracts and several million full-text papers with the help of Medscan software They adapted for comprehensive search and prediction of drug targets as well as constructing of signaling pathways from the internal curated database.
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