PLANTS IN CANCER TREATMENT
Preservation of Endangered Anticancer-Metabolite Producing Plants
How Sources for Anticancer Metabolites​ are Influenced by Anthropogenic Changes in the Environment through Overexploitation and Climate Change
Introduction
Medicinal plants have played a crucial role in medicine for centuries and continue to do so today, especially in the search for new cancer treatments. With cancer claiming 9.6 million lives globally in 2018[1], the need for effective therapies is more pressing than ever. One major hurdle in cancer treatment is drug resistance[2]. This makes the exploration of plant-derived substances an important research topic in facing the need for new anti-cancer compounds. Many of the secondary metabolites produced by plants to defend themselves against pathogens can be used either directly or as templates to synthesize anticancer medications. Plant-derived substances often show synergistic interactions with other cancer treatments against malignant tumor cells, while minimizing toxic effects against normal cells[3]. This bears great potential with regard to the number of species that have not yet been discovered while at the same time putting pressure, in the form of over exploitation, on species that are currently being used in medical research. The extinction of particular – known or hitherto unknown – plant species would take with it promising opportunities for developing unique treatments to control a diverse range of modern-day cancer-related and infectious diseases[4].
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[1] (Ferlay, et al., 2019)
[2] (Haider, Pandey, Banjare, Prem, & Soni, 2020)
[3] (Khazir, Mir, Pilcher, & Riley, 2014)
[4] (Ibrahim, MinKyun, Oh, & Hamann, 2013)