Brief Introduction

Cancer, also known as a malignant tumor, is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. Cancer is one of the major causes of death worldwide where the number of cancer patient is in continuous rise. In 2012, about 14.1 million new cases of cancer occurred globally. It caused about 8.2 million deaths or 14.6% of all human deaths. By 2030, it is predicted that there will be 26 million new cancer cases and 17 million cancer deaths per year.

Today, despite considerable efforts, cancer still remains an aggressive killer worldwide. The most common and highly effective methods of cancer treatment are surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, these therapies have numerous limitations and drawbacks. Most cancer patients are diagnosed too late to undergo surgery because of poor diagnosis and other factors. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy have serious side effects and complications. Furthermore, chemotherapy and radiotherapy can result in gradual resistance of cancer cells against treatment. Therefore, there is a constant demand to develop new, effective, and affordable anti-cancer drugs.

In this project, we developed a web server called Anti-Cancer Predictor for predicting anti-cancer activity of given compounds. Anti-Cancer Predictor is free and open to all users. The web server is rapid and accurate (Accuracy > 90% and AUC > 0.95), which enables us to screen tens of millions of compounds and discover new anti-cancer agents. The web server can be applied to drug repositioning for anti-cancer therapy by screening 1836 approved drugs.