Pharmacophore Development for Anti-Lung Cancer Drugs

Lung cancer is one particular type of cancer that is deadly and relatively common than any other. Treatment is with chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery depending on the type and stage of the disease. Focusing on drugs used for chemotherapy and their associated side effects, there is a need to design and develop new anti-lung cancer drugs with minimal side effects and improved efficacy. The pharmacophore model appears to be a very helpful tool serving in the designing and development of new lead compounds. In this paper, pharmacophore analysis of 10 novel anti-lung cancer compounds was validated for the first time. Using LigandScout the pharmacophore features were predicted and 3D pharmacophores were extracted via VMD software. A training set data was collected from literature and the proposed model was applied to the training set whereby validating and verifying similar activity as that of the most active compounds was achieved. Therefore pharmacophore develoipment could be recommended for further studies.