Fastidious Anatomization of Biota Procured Compounds on Cancer Drug Discovery

BACKGROUND: Natural products are the rootstock for identifying new drugs since the ancient time. In comparison with synthetic drugs, they have abounding beneficial effects in bestowing protection against many diseases, including cancer. Cancer has been observed as a major threat in recent decades, and its prevalence is expected to increase over the next decades. Also, current treatment methods in cancer therapy such as radiation therapy and chemotherapy cause severe adverse side effects among the cancer population. Therefore, it is exigent to find a remedy without any side effects. METHODS: In recent years, research has focused to obtain naturally derived products to encounter this complication. The current pace of investigations, such as gene identification and advancement in combinatorial chemistry, leads to the aberrant access to a wide range of new synthetic drugs. In fact, natural products act as templates in structure predictions and synthesis of new compounds with enhanced biological activities. RESULTS: Recent development in the genomics has established the importance of polymorphism, which implies that patients require different drugs for their treatment. This demands the discovery of large number of drugs, but limited sources restrict the pharmaceutical industry to overcome these major obstacles. Use of natural products and their semisynthetic and synthetic analogues could alleviate these problems. However, the lack of standardization in terms of developing methods for evaluating the chemical composition, efficacy, isolation and international approval is still a major limitation in this field. In the past few years, several drug-approval authorities including FDA and WHO have allowed using these naturally derived compounds in humans. CONCLUSION: In this review, we described the usage of some natural products from plant and marine sources in cancer treatment and shed some light on semi-synthetic and synthetic compounds derived from natural sources used in cancer therapy.