Recent trends in fragment-based anticancer drug design strategies against different targets: A mini-review

Cancer is a rapidly growing disease in modern society. Chemotherapy is the first choice for cancer treatment. Design and development of new chemotherapeutic drugs by targeting specific proteins are put down by a high attrition rate at different stages. Fragment-based drug design (FBDD) is one of the successful structure-based drug design processes to avoid attrition-related problems. This review highlighted the computational and experimental FBDD techniques used to design molecules with anticancer properties. This study describes FBBD strategies for different targets like aurora kinase, phosphoinositide-dependent protein kinase-1 (PDK1), signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3), myeloid cell leukemia-1 (Mcl-1), tankyrase (TNKS), choline kinase, protein kinase, tyrosine kinase and lysine-specific demethylase 1 (LSD1) which are vital targets for cancer treatments. This review will enrich the scientific community to understand the fragment-based design strategies for finding suitable leads over high throughput screening (HTS) in the future.