Cancer is one of the most dreadful diseases of the century. Nearly 8.2 million people died of cancer in 2012 and approximately 14.1 million new cases were reported. Despite advanced treatments and technologies, the number of deaths is dramatically increasing annually, and the treatment of cancer remains challenging due to the deficiency of specialized and targeted therapy. New modalities are urgently required for both cancer treatment and prevention.
Natural products may be an important source of new lead compounds for anticancer and chemopreventive drugs. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, numerous bioactive constituents from natural sources have been isolated and characterized. Many amongst these bioactive constituents are used as active ingredients in modern medicine contributing to the prevention and treatment of a variety of diseases. Natural products are a promising source of preventive and therapeutic agents and have shown supportive uses.
Chemoprevention is associated with the use of agents that can stop, reverse, or delay tumorigenesis. Several phytochemicals originated from medicinal plants and marine sources have been referred to be involved in a specific pathway of the carcinogenic process. Numerous mechanisms have been reported on the chemopreventive action of dietary herbal ingredients, however, it is highly needed to find intracellular-signaling cascades as molecular targets for chemopreventive phytochemicals. Within the past decades, it has been demonstrated that the occurrence of cancer is not only the consequence of genetic disorders but also is resulting from epigenetic modifications. In addition to the CpG methylation and post-translational modifications of histones, the regulation by microRNAs (miRNAs) is also included in the epigenetic modification. MiRNAs are counted as short non-coding RNAs in the epigenetic machinery which play an important role in the regulation of gene expression.
Recent discoveries and data highlight the role of natural products in the prevention of different cancers. The current Research Topic aims to bring together leading researchers to exchange and share their findings on the hot topics of novel identified plant and marine-derived natural biomolecules with cancer chemoprevention activity and their corresponding molecular mechanism of action.
We welcome evidence-based studies related to natural products with chemopreventive potential from plants and as well as marine life, focusing on the following subthemes:
• The potency of chemopreventive phytochemicals for the epigenetic modification of cancerous cells;
• The epigenetic mechanisms of chemopreventive phytochemicals;
• Blocking the initiation or reverse the promotion stage of multistep carcinogenesis by phytochemicals;
• Stop or delay the progression of precancerous cells into malignant ones by the administration of herbal drugs;
• Molecular alterations associated with carcinogenesis occur in cell-signaling pathways that regulate cancer stem cell proliferation and differentiation;
• Effect of both external and internal stimulation in the cellular-signaling cascades, as the prime targets of various chemopreventive phytochemicals.
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One can find more information about the Article Types guidelines in the Ethnopharmacology section
here.
All the manuscripts submitted to this project will be peer-reviewed and need to fully comply with the
Four Pillars of Best Practice in Ethnopharmacology (you can freely download the full version
here).