When two drugs are better than one
STU BORMAN · C&EN Global Enterprise · 2017
Drug combinations often have deleterious effects, but a new study reports a method to identify drugs that play nice with each other. Stefan Kubicek of the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and coworkers compiled a compound library to search for drugs that work better together than alone, and they used it to identify a combo that fights drug-resistant cancer (Nat. Chem. Biol. 2017, DOI: 10.1038/nchembio.2382). The list of more than 30,000 Food & Drug Administration-approved drug products is too large to screen efficiently for favorable combinations. Kubicek and coworkers therefore narrowed down the list to a more easily screenable collection. They eliminated redundant drug products with identical active ingredients, removed biologicals, and made other selections to reduce the list to 954 systemically active small molecules. They grouped these compounds into classes based on their structures and known activities and then used software to