Cancer is one of the leading causes of death, representing a major public health problem worldwide. The most widely used procedures for treating or removing tumors are chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgical dissection.
The main goal of cancer therapeutics is the elimination of malignant cells by regulated cell death (RCD), an autonomous and orderly process regulated by multiple gene in order to maintain internal stability.
Apoptosis, a cell death characterized by cytoplasm shrinkage, chromatin condensation and fragmentation into membrane-bound apoptotic bodies, is the most studied RCD and for long time drugs able to promote apoptosis in cancer cells have long been developed. However, since malignant cells can avoid this type of death by inhibiting the activation of apoptotic signals, in recent years many novel non-apoptotic cell death forms, including autophagy-dependent cell death, necroptosis, pyroptosis, ferroptosis and lysosomal-dependent cell death, have caught the attention of scientific community, revealing significant potential in cancer treatment to overcome apoptosis resistance.
Nature has always been an incomparable source of bioactive compounds with therapeutic potentials, characterized by easy accessibility and applicability as well as reduced cytotoxicity. Several anticancer drugs originate from plants, such as vincristine, etoposide and paclitaxel are still the mainstay of cancer therapy and will continue to play an important role also in the future. Increasing evidence has shown that many other natural products, such as alkaloids, terpenoids, flavonoids, etc., have promising anticancer activity in single or combinatorial therapy, modulating the cancer microenvironment and different signalling pathways, mainly relative to cell death via apoptosis and non-apoptotic mechanisms, as necrosis or autophagy.
Low oral bioavailability, poor solubility, and ineffective systemic distribution are limitations of natural products that can be overcome through nano-formulations. Indeed, different types of nanoparticles have been designed and developed as drug delivery systems to incorporate natural products without compromising biological activity, rather promoting it and providing a platform for targeted delivery to tumor sites. Nano-formulations of natural products can increase the effectiveness of cancer treatment.
This Research Topic aims to establish a collection of papers to provide a cutting-edge insight to all interested in this area of research.
All the manuscripts submitted to the collection covering natural products will need to fully comply with the Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology (you can freely download the full version
here). We also expect that the MS follow the standards established in the
ConPhyMP statement Front. Pharmacol. 13:953205.