Abstract
A global, comprehensive and open access listing of approved anticancer drugs does not currently exist. Partial information is available from multiple sources, including regulatory authorities, national formularies and scientific agencies. Many such data sources include drugs used in oncology for supportive care, diagnostic or other non-antineoplastic uses. We describe a methodology to combine and cleanse relevant data from multiple sources to produce an open access database of drugs licensed specifically for therapeutic antineoplastic purposes. The resulting list is provided as an open access database, (http://www.redo-project.org/cancer-drugs-db/), so that it may be used by researchers as input for further research projects, for example literature-based text mining for drug repurposing.
Highlights
The availability of curated datasets across diverse areas of medical research provides input to machine learning algorithms, natural language processing and the data mining of published scientific literature
In our own work on drug repurposing in oncology, our literature-based methodology relies heavily on database tables of drug repurposing candidates, molecular targets and pathways, the World Health Organization Essential Medicines List and so on (Pantziarka et al, 2018)
An initial list of drugs used in oncology was created by extracting the list of cancer drugs from the NCI website on February 10, 2020, and combined with the informal lists we have previously developed for use in our repurposing projects
Summary
The availability of curated datasets across diverse areas of medical research provides input to machine learning algorithms, natural language processing and the data mining of published scientific literature. For ‘hard repurposing’ projects, in which we are interested only in the potential of non-cancer drugs to be repurposed as cancer therapeutics, the ReDO_DB list provides a starting point for building a dataset for literature mining. For a number of cancer-specific projects all forms of repurposing candidates, including cancer drugs that could be used outside of their licensed indications, needed to be included. In these cases we have not been able to identify a curated list of cancer drugs analogous to the ReDO list of repurposing candidates
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