Title:Natural Products As Antimitotic Agents
Volume: 14
Issue: 20
Author(s): Stefano Dall'Acqua
Affiliation:
Keywords:
Natural products, Antimitotic agents, Tubulin, Anticancer.
Abstract: Natural products still play an important role in the medicinal chemistry, especially in some therapeutic
areas. As example more than 60% of currently-used anticancer agents are derives from natural sources
including plants, marine organisms or micro-organism. Thus natural products (NP) are an high-impact source
of new “lead compounds” or new potential therapeutic agents despite the large development of biotechnology
and combinatorial chemistry in the drug discovery and development. Many examples of anticancer drugs as
paclitaxel, combretastatin, bryostatin and discodermolide have shown the importance of NP in the anticancer chemotherapy
through many years. Many organisms have been studied as sources of drugs namely plants, micro-organisms and marine
organisms and the obtained NP can be considered a group of “privileged chemical structures” evolved in nature to interact
with other organisms. For this reason NP are a good starting points for pharmaceutical research and also for library
design. Tubulin and microtubules are one of the most studied targets for the search of anticancer compounds. Microtubule
targeting agents (MTA) also named antimitotic agents are compounds that are able to perturb mitosis but are also able to
arrest cell growing during interphase. The anticancer drugs, taxanes and vinca alkaloids have established tubulin as important
target in cancer therapy. More recently the vascular disrupting agents (VDA) combretastatin analogues were studied
for their antimitotics properties. This review will consider the anti mitotic NP and their potential impact in the development
of new therapeutic agents.
