Zhang Yunqin, Xu Guowei, Zhang Shuqun, Wang Dong, Saravana Prabha P, Zuo Zhili
State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Plant Resources in West China, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, 650201, China.
University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
Nat Prod Bioprospect. 2018 Aug;8(4):303-319. doi: 10.1007/s13659-018-0162-1. Epub 2018 Apr 9.
Cancer is the leading cause of human death which seriously threatens human life. The antimalarial drug artemisinin and its derivatives have been discovered with considerable anticancer properties. Simultaneously, a variety of target-selective artemisinin-related compounds with high efficiency have been discovered. Many researches indicated that artemisinin-related compounds have cytotoxic effects against a variety of cancer cells through pleiotropic effects, including inhibiting the proliferation of tumor cells, promoting apoptosis, inducing cell cycle arrest, disrupting cancer invasion and metastasis, preventing angiogenesis, mediating the tumor-related signaling pathways, and regulating tumor microenvironment. More importantly, artemisinins demonstrated minor side effects to normal cells and manifested the ability to overcome multidrug-resistance which is widely observed in cancer patients. Therefore, we concentrated on the new advances and development of artemisinin and its derivatives as potential antitumor agents in recent 5 years. It is our hope that this review could be helpful for further exploration of novel artemisinin-related antitumor agents.
癌症是严重威胁人类生命的主要死因。抗疟药物青蒿素及其衍生物已被发现具有相当的抗癌特性。同时，还发现了多种高效的靶向选择性青蒿素相关化合物。许多研究表明，青蒿素相关化合物通过多效性作用对多种癌细胞具有细胞毒性作用，包括抑制肿瘤细胞增殖、促进凋亡、诱导细胞周期停滞、破坏癌症侵袭和转移、防止血管生成、介导肿瘤相关信号通路以及调节肿瘤微环境。更重要的是，青蒿素对正常细胞显示出轻微的副作用，并表现出克服癌症患者中广泛存在的多药耐药性的能力。因此，我们关注了近5年来青蒿素及其衍生物作为潜在抗肿瘤药物的新进展和发展情况。我们希望这篇综述有助于进一步探索新型青蒿素相关抗肿瘤药物。
