How to Design an Anticancer Drug

When surveying the literature on this subject over the last thirty years, we may notice that pathways for such a discovery were essentially as follows. 

In other words, several anticancer drugs are present in nature and they may be isolated by appropriate chemical techniques. The yield of such extractions, however, remains obviously very low and chemists are normally required to prepare synthetically large quantities of these natural products. 

Other examples of natural drugs may be pointed out streptozotocin (from streptomyces achromogenes), bleomycin (from streptomyces verticillus), adriamy-cin and daunomycin (from streptomyces pencetius), mitomycin C (from streptomyces caesipitosus), vincristine, vinblastine and vindoline (from catharanthus roseus or vinca rosea L.). 

Let us consider for example the geometrical structure of Rosenberg s active platinum drugs. Up to now, the most efficient anticancer derivatives of the series have 

if a molecular structure contains both (i) pairs of chlorine atoms in a square-planar-like 3.4 A situation and (ii) a planar ring with highly basic endocyclic N or O atoms, we may expect that the coexistence of these two structural peculiarities will confer a potential antitumor activity on the molecules in question. 

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