It could speed the identification and development of new, more effective drugs against breast, prostate, lung and other cancers, according to a report scheduled for the Nov./Dec. issue of ACS’ Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, a bi-monthly publication.

Computers have become a mainstay in the drug discovery process and have led to the identification of dozens of promising anticancer drugs. However, as the amount and complexity of information in a chemical

In the new report, David J. Wild and colleagues analyzed data from the National Cancer Institute Developmental Therapeutics Program, a database of 40,000 compounds that have been tested against 60 tumor cell lines. The researchers identified a set of common structural features that can be used to more accurately predict which compounds are most active against cancer cells. In a series of experiments, they showed that applying these new criteria significantly increased the accuracy rate of identifying drug-like molecules in comparison to standard screening methods.-American Chemical Society