Designing Anti-cancer Drugs and Directing Anti-cancer Drug Therapy

A web application was designed and implemented as a guide to be used by clinicians when designing the best drug therapy for a specific cancer patient, given biological data derived from the patients tumor tissue biopsy. A representation of the patients metabolic pathways is displayed as a graph in the application, with nodes as substrates and products and edges as enzymes. The top metabolically active sub-paths in the pathway, ranked using an algorithm based on both the patients biological data and the graph topology, are also displayed and can be individually highlighted to examine potential enzymatic sites to be disrupted by a drug these sites serve as a guide for designing the patients specific drug therapy. Displayed next to each sub-path is the subpath score used to decide its rank, as well as the predicted patient survival time to indicate how effective that specific drug will be in alleviating that patient’s cancer. Future work includes an animation component to track the patients progress and re-design the drug therapy as needed. The website can viewed at http://oncomira.appspot.com/pathways.