Cancer is the second world's deadliest disease. Despite substantial advancements in medical technology for cancer therapies, cancer mortality remains greater than projected, and cancer treatment requires additional study. The research carried out in natural products is due to the presence of bioactive compounds, unique structures, and mechanistic actions. Prevention of drug resistance in chemotherapy is predominant in the usage of anticancer drugs. Clinical chemotherapeutic medicines work by causing cancer cells to die, the majority of which is apoptotic. Another way to combat drug resistance in cancer therapy is circumventing apoptosis by targeting non-apoptotic cell death. The authors discussed in this chapter both apoptotic and non-apoptotic cell death.
TopIntroduction
Cancer is a common fatal disease. The people who are affected by cancer have felt as short life period and not a good quality of life. It affected more than 10 million people in the world per year. World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that it affects one in five men and one in six women in their life and kills one in eight men and one in eleven women. It is a huge burden on society. Cancer is a multifaceted and refractory illness produced by a complex interplay of local tissue microenvironmental and hereditary variables (Klemm and Joyce, 2015). Cancer is a collection of disorders characterized by uncontrolled and aberrant cell division, as well as malignant characteristics such as invasion and metastasis. Cancer is a global issue with significant morbidity and fatality rates.
Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy are the most common cancer treatments today. While surgery may not always be able to eliminate all cancer cells from the human body, both chemotherapy and radiotherapy kill the normal cells in the body. This is the biggest side effect in cancer treatment. For more than half an epoch, natural products have been broadly scrutinized to prevent drug resistance in cancer chemotherapy due to their astonishing diversity in the chemical field. Mostly natural products derived from plants and animals have been the source for all pharmaceutical companies. Natural products have recently continued to serve as exemplars for biologically active molecules, especially for cancer treatment (Cragg and Pezzuto, 2016).
The purpose of cancer treatments is that:
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It recovers health of the human beings.
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The disease is conveyed under control due to the improvement in the immune system.
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Prevention of reoccurrence of cancer is carried out.
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The symptoms are reduced.
Depending on the type of cancer, there are many types of cancer treatment. Some cancer patients will just require one treatment. Most people, on the other hand, receive a mix of therapies, such as surgery combined with chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy. They are frequently used in tandem. Surgical treatment, chemotherapy, irradiation, and hormone therapy are the most common types of cancer treatment. For clinical treatment, chemotherapy is broadly used. Chemotherapeutic pills destroy swiftly proliferating malignant cells. Cancer chemotherapy is the customary core therapeutic usage. Prevention of drug resistance in cancer chemotherapy is predominant in the usage of anticancer drugs. Because of their distinct chemical structures and bioactive characteristics, natural goods are effective against medication resistance. The discovery of drug-resistant proteins and drug-efflux inhibition activities is the mainstay of cancer chemotherapy (Robey et al., 2018). Drug resistance must be managed carefully for chemotherapy to be effective. Natural goods deserved to dazed medication confrontation, according to the scientific and industrial communities.
Common treatment strategies are including radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy with surgery, resulting in a high treatment failure rate. For example, doxorubicin is used as a chemotherapeutic agent for cancer therapy which persuades the cancer cells as well as normal cells also. There is continuous development in the treatment of cancer for rectifying the side effects in the body. Paclitaxel which is derived from the bark of Taxus Breifolia is one of the most successful tales in plant-based natural products (Ashraf, 2020). Trabectedin, anthracycline, and enediynes which are derived from the marine environment and microbiological organisms have also been used as high therapeutic agents. Currently, 10,000 plant species are used in the medicinal field which is available in rain forests and grasslands also. Out of 93 in 174 new compounds which are derived from natural products have been commercialized for cancer treatment in the 1980s (Amaral et al., 2019). From 1981 onwards, new novel drugs which are used for cancer treatment are mostly natural products, because, they contain bioactive compounds. National Cancer Institute (NCI) has identified two anticancer drugs which are derived from natural products during the periods of 19th century are camptothecin and taxol. Figure 1 shows chemotherapeutic agents used for cancer therapy.