Abstract
Cancer, one of the major causes of human morbidity and mortality, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled division of abnormal cells. Nature continues to produce a great wealth of natural molecules endowed with cytotoxic activity in the treatment of malignant diseases. Presently, natural products have played a pivotal role in cancer chemotherapy and chemoprevention for over half a century and provided established anticancer drugs, for example, camptothecin, doxorubicin, taxol, podophyllotoxin, adriamycin, vinblastine and vincristine, new lead compounds for synthetic modifications, and for understanding cellular and molecular mechanisms of actions for their anticancer potentials. The search for naturally occurring compounds having cytotoxic significance has continued in recent years, with the constituents of marine fauna and flora, as well as those of terrestrial microorganisms and plants, being investigated for their anticancer activities. It has been found that only ~20% of the anticancer agents approved in the period 1981-2010 were purely synthetic, whereas the remaining ~80% were either natural products or inspired by natural products, indicating that research into structures from nature is indispensable in the search for anticancer lead-compounds.
In this special collection, “Natural products as sources of cytotoxic compounds with potential for development into anticancer agents,” we present a set of research papers concerning various aspects of the cytotoxic properties of either plant extracts or isolated natural products. We strongly trust that these publications in this special collection will contribute to the development of natural product-based and innovative drug candidates.
Finally, we wish to thank the authors for their contributions to this special collection and the reviewers for their valuable work as well as colleagues in various departments for putting it into production.
