The Application of Small Molecule Drugs: Cancer Therapy

According to the World Health Organization, Cancer is one of the world’s deadliest diseases and is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Cancer has been responsible for almost 10 million deaths worldwide in 2020, with the most common forms of cancer being breast, lung, and colon & rectum cancer. To put into scale just how deadly the disease is, the rate of cancer deaths per year is about 158 per 100,000 men and women. Current traditional cancer therapies include chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery. Although these traditional cancer therapy methods have been somewhat effective over the past decades, they come with serious adverse health effects and have been related to very serious long-term side effects. As a result, over the recent years, targeted cancer therapy using small molecule drugs has become a focus in the medical field of cancer treatment. Small molecule drugs have a very advanced and tunable targeting ability which is effective in passing through cell membranes and reaching their designed intracellular targets. Most of these drugs can be administered orally, and due to their very small size, they are able to pass through a variety of obstacles in order to inhibit certain cancer-related biomolecules. In this review, I provide a summary of several different SMIs (small molecule inhibitors) that can be used in cancer therapy and explain recent advances as well as future outlooks in the field of SMIs for cancer treatment.