“…Searching for optimized or simplified indole alkaloids has been the spotlight of antitumor drug discovery for several years. In our continual search for natural antitumor products from medicinal plants, indole alkaloids were found to be the most potent candidates in a cytotoxicity bioassay against five human cancer cell lines [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29]. Among these cytotoxic indoles, 3 α -acetonyltabersonine, an aspidosperma-type monoterpenoid indole alkaloid, structurally similar to vindoline, showed the best bioactivity, with IC 50 values of 0.2–0.6 μM against human myeloid leukemia HL-60 cells, hepatocellular carcinoma SMMC-7721 cells, lung cancer A549 cells, breast cancer MCF-7 cells, and colon cancer SW480 cells.…”