A Database Developed with Information Extracted from Chemotherapy Drug Package Inserts to Enhance Future Prescriptions.

Package inserts of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved prescription drugs, including chemotherapy drugs, must follow a specific format imposed by the FDA. These inserts are created by unrelated pharmaceutical companies and as a result tend to be very different in the way the required information is reported. Chemical and pharmacokinetic properties including absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADME/Tox) are crucial elements to a prescribing information packet and are often missing from the reported data. This undergraduate research project analyzes the information packets of 85 randomly chosen chemically diverse chemotherapy drugs for four parameters important to patient care; viz, volume of distribution (V_D), elimination half-life (t_1/2), bioavailability, and water solubility. The prescribing information from the package inserts of each was analyzed in detail and pertinent information was consequently tabulated into a database using a commercial informatics platform. Then using a substructure search-tool, sixty-five chemotherapy drugs containing a carbonyl group in their chemical structure were selected and as hypothesized, it was found that many of these packets were significantly lacking in the reporting of the four parameters of interest. To further enhance this cataloged data, a freely available online database was consequently developed (http://annotation.dbi.udel.edu/CancerDB/) with the intention that the chemical, biological, and clinical community will now add some of the missing parameters.