A Brief Overview of Plant-Derived Chemotherapeutic Agents for Cancer Therapy

Plants are the inexhaustible source of biologically active compounds. For thousands of years, humans have been using plants to treat diseases. In the past decades, a large number of researches have made many efforts to extract medicinal molecules from plants to treat diseases. The use of pure medicinal compounds has advantages over the use of medicinal plants in the traditional way. Pure compounds allow for better drug dose management and combination therapy. In addition, by focusing on the main therapeutic molecules, the unwanted effects of thousands of complex molecules in medicinal plants are eliminated. On the other hand, by determining the structure of pure pharmaceutical compounds, it is possible to manipulate them to improve therapeutic efficiency or reduce the side effects of the drug. In recent decades, some compounds have been extracted from plants that are the source of a number of important chemotherapy drugs for cancer treatment. This article provides a brief review of some chemotherapy drugs derived from plants.