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Abstract
The discovery of cytotoxic monotherapy drugs addressed some limitations in treating cancer patients with surgery and radiation. Although promising, monotherapies had limitations of their own. During the 1960s, oncologists at the National Cancer Institute uncovered a clinical algorithm for effectively designing chemotherapy drugs in the form of the Fractional Kill Hypothesis. This working hypothesis underlies current clinical practice and modern scientific rationale for chemotherapy efficacy, stating that a combination chemotherapy response rate is the independent product of individual drug response rates. This project tests this hypothesis through creating clinical databases of response rates for historical monotherapy and modern chemotherapy regimens to assess the agreement between monotherapy and combination response rates. Results demonstrated that breast, lung, and ovarian cancer exhibited disagreement by producing underpredicted responses rates. Intriguingly, colorectal cancer showed disagreement by producing enhanced response rates to several combinations, which could reflect synergistic drug interactions for some combinations.