NATURAL PRODUCTS FROM BRAZIL AS SOURCE FOR NEW ANTICANCER DRUGS

MANOEL ODORICO DE MORAES FILHO(1)

(1)Clinical Pharmacology Unit and Experimental Oncology Laboratory, Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Federal University of Ceará, Brazil.

The development of more effective drugs for treating patients with cancer has been a major human endeavor over the past 50 years, and 21st century now promises some dramatic new directions. Nature has provided many effective anticancer agents in current use, such as the microbial-derived drugs, dactinomycin bleomycin and doxorubicin, plant-derived drugs, vinblastine, irinotecan, topotecan, etoposide, and paclitaxel, and marine-derived drugs, citarabine and bryostatin. Therefore, search for novel antitumor agents continues providing convincing evidence that natural products could be a source of novel cancer chemotherapeutic agents and leads for synthetic modification. Although, cancer drug discovery has been, and continues to be, a process of serendipity, “screening” natural products remains one of the most important methods in cancer drug discovery. More recently, progress in molecular pharmacology has demonstrated that each anticancer drug has a unique molecular target. Presently, drug development has focused on natural product compounds that specifically inhibit and/or modify tumor-specific molecular biological changes (target-based drug development). These compounds include angiogenesis inhibitors and matrix metalloproteinase inhibitors. In Brazil, there are many examples of plant and marine organisms-derived molecules screened in the Experimental Oncology Laboratory of the Federal University of Ceará, Brazil, with potential to be developed as new anticancer drugs.