A Systematic Review of Literatures: To Identify Non-Cancer Drugs Repurposed for Lung Cancer

Abstract Aim The aim of this study is to identify literature suggesting drug repurposing based on various medicines found to possess enhanced efficacy against lung cancer in humans based on pre-clinical and retrospective analysis. Often pre-clinical and retrospective study findings may deviate from the results of randomized prospective clinical studies, this study intends to identify the efficacious new drugs against lung cancer in placebo-controlled studies. Methods A systematic review of literature was performed in PubMed database on 30 th August 2023 without any fixed timeline with terms related to ‘drug repurposing’ and ‘Lung cancer’. Post screening of literature, the names of non-chemo drugs identified were further searched in clinicaltrials.gov additionally NCT# was searched in google scholar, in-case the trial results were not available in respective source to validate the study findings. Results In PubMed 513 articles were found, 9% articles mentioned about drugs with potential efficacy against lung cancer in humans. In these 45 articles 61 non-chemo drugs were identified from specific 293 clinical studies. Among these 30 studies for 23 drugs were in advanced clinical stage and 9 non-chemo medicines were identified to have positive results in randomized controlled clinical trials, rest of the drugs failed to attend designated clinical efficacy till-date. Anti-alcoholism, anti-bacterial, anti-emetics, cox-2 inhibitors, and HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor are the drugs that could potentially effective against advanced non-small cell lung cancer. Conclusion Applying the advanced search methodology to identify drugs repurposed or approved for targeted disease. All these 9 non-chemo were screened under randomized trial and currently only one drug disulfiram was found to enhance survival and response, reduced disease progression, in advanced NSCLC originally indicated for anti-alcoholism.