Chemical and Physical Metrics in Establishing Benchmarks for Chemotherapy Drug Efficacy

Small-molecule enzyme inhibitors have been employed as chemotherapy medications for decades, proving to be valuable tools in inhibiting oncogenic mechanisms at the molecular level [1]. The prevalence of these inhibitors as drugs allows for extensive cross-comparison of their properties, both chemical and dynamic. Many of these properties are intertwined with binding energy dynamics and the mobility of a drug throughout cell membranes, defining their efficiency and capability in being transported to a target enzyme and binding to said enzyme to inhibit its activity [2]. In this paper, I compare chemical and physical properties of FDA-approved cancer chemotherapy medications in five families of enzyme inhibitors to identify metric-based trends or benchmarks that may estimate the viability or extent of efficacy for a given chemotherapy medication in early research and development.