Figure 6.
Overlap of cancer drug targets with cancer drivers. We grouped the cancer drugs into the three categories: broadly cytotoxic agents such as platinum complexes and DNA intercalating agents; cytotoxic agents that act through a protein, such as tubulin inhibitors, that do not have biological selectivity; and targeted agents that act through clear protein function-modulating mechanisms such as kinase inhibitors and nuclear hormone receptor antagonists. When we compared the targets of agents in the third group to a consensus reference list on cancer driver genes43 we observe only a small overlap between cancer drivers and current cancer drug targets.