Unravelling the Anticancer Mechanisms of Traditional Herbal Medicines with Metabolomics

Abstract

Metabolite profiling of cancer cells presents many opportunities for anticancer drug discovery. The Chinese, Indian, and African flora, in particular, offers a diverse source of anticancer therapeutics as documented in traditional folklores. In-depth scientific information relating to mechanisms of action, quality control, and safety profile will promote their extensive usage in cancer therapy. Metabolomics may be a more holistic strategy to gain valuable insights into the anticancer mechanisms of action of plants but this has remained largely unexplored. This review, therefore, presents the available metabolomics studies on the anticancer effects of herbal medicines commonly used in Africa and Asia. In addition, we present some scientifically understudied ‘candidate plants’ for cancer metabolomics studies and highlight the relevance of metabolomics in addressing other challenges facing the drug development of anticancer herbs. Finally, we discussed the challenges of using metabolomics to uncover the underlying mechanisms of potential anticancer herbs and the progress made in this regard.

Traditional Tibetan Medicine Twenty-Five Wei’er Tea Pills Ameliorate Rheumatoid Arthritis Based on Chemical Crosstalk Between Gut Microbiota and the Host

“…The imbalance of gut microbiota may lead to changes in metabolomic profiling in the human body which accounts for etiology of autoimmune diseases ( Kim et al, 2017 ; Tsai et al, 2021 ; Yang and Cong, 2021 ). Metabolomics, the systematic study of the sets of metabolites in an organism, is an excellent tool to provide further insight or scientific basis into specific pathogeneses as well as the mechanism of actions of botanical medicines ( Marchev et al, 2021 ; Oyenihi et al, 2021 ). In addition, ethnomedicine such as berberine can modulate the composition and metabolites of gut microbiota, and thus ameliorate the diseases ( Cheng et al, 2021 ).…”

Chemical and cytotoxicity profiles of 11 pink pepper (Schinus spp.) samples via non-targeted hyphenated high-performance thin-layer chromatography

“…Most cytostatic or cytotoxic compounds used today in cancer treatment are derived from plants (Beutler, 2019 ; Davison & Brimble, 2019 ), but the advances in this field are slow due to the difficulty in applying high-throughput methods, which are useful for screening synthetic molecule libraries, to complex mixtures obtained from plant parts (Beutler, 2019 ; Davison & Brimble, 2019 ; Hackman et al, 2020 ; Huo et al, 2022 ; Mazumder et al, 2018 ; Najmi et al, 2022 ). The application of metabolomics in cancer research comes with many challenges, such as technological limitations, high costs of instrumentation, and data processing, among others (Oyenihi et al, 2021 ), but the introduction of non-targeted hyphenated HPTLC as a supplementary or supporting tool for metabolomic analysis can bring advantages for allowing both a pre-screening of interesting biological activities and direct determination of structure–activity relationship after the elution of active substances from the plate into HRMS or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy workflows (Ge et al, 2018 , 2019 ).…”

Preclinical findings: The pharmacological targets and molecular mechanisms of ferulic acid treatment for COVID-19 and osteosarcoma via targeting autophagy

“…Patients with OS and COVID-19 are medically hard to treat as current clinical treatment is not yet available, and specific functions of the pathogenetic genes involved in OS and COVID-19 are still unreported. In China, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is commonly used for chronic clinical disorders, including malignant cancers ( 10 ). In anti-COVID-19 practice, the use of TCM for COVID-19 treatment has been recommended in most Chinese provinces, which is characterized by enhanced cure rate ( 11 ).…”