Plant natural compounds: targeting pathways of autophagy as anti‐cancer therapeutic agents

Abstract

Natural compounds derived from plant sources are well characterized as possessing a wide variety of remarkable anti-tumour properties, for example modulating programmed cell death, primarily referring to apoptosis, and autophagy. Distinct from apoptosis, autophagy (an evolutionarily conserved, multi-step lysosomal degradation process in which a cell destroys long-lived proteins and damaged organelles) may play crucial regulatory roles in many pathological processes, most notably in cancer. In this review, we focus on highlighting several representative plant natural compounds such as curcumin, resveratrol, paclitaxel, oridonin, quercetin and plant lectin -that may lead to cancer cell death -for regulation of some core autophagic pathways, involved in Ras-Raf signalling, Beclin-1 interactome, BCR-ABL, PI3KCI/Akt/mTOR, FOXO1 signalling and p53. Taken together, these findings would provide a new perspective for exploiting more plant natural compounds as potential novel antitumour drugs, by targeting the pathways of autophagy, for future cancer therapeutics.

Essential role of autophagy in fucoxanthin-induced cytotoxicity to human epithelial cervical cancer HeLa cells

“…The role of the autophagic process in antitumor therapy has not been clearly elucidated [18,19] . After treatment with antitumor drugs, some cancer cells undergo autophagy as a temporary survival mechanism, and the suppression of autophagy leads to apoptosis, thus enhancing antitumor effects.…”

Growth Inhibition and Apoptosis Induction by Vincetoxicum pumilum Decne. on HL-60 and K562 Leukemic Cell Lines

“…Plant-based formulations have emerged as promising new sources for investigations of related molecular events. Detailed chemical analyses of certain botanical medicines have been performed to establish the safety and efficacy of these potential anti-cancer remedies (22). As several anti-cancer phytochemicals can alter the function of key molecules regulating programmed cell death, plants with apoptosismodulating potential may ultimately prove useful as new chemotherapeutics (23).…”

Oridonin induces NPM mutant protein translocation and apoptosis in NPM1c+ acute myeloid leukemia cells in vitro

“…There is growing interest in the possible use of natural products for the treatment of malignant disease and their potential for combination with current effective drugs [9] . Oridonin is an example of a natural product recently described to have potential as an inhibitor of carcinogenesis and inflammation [10] . Oridonin is a plant-derived diterpenoid isolated from Rabdosia rubescens that is most commonly used as a Chinese traditional medicine.…”