Abstract

A REVIEW ON ANTICANCER AGENTS FROM MARINE SOURCES

Ayesha Begum* and Dr. Sudha Parimala

Abstract

Cancer, known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a broad group of various diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. Unfortunately, despite the scientific substantiation and efficiency of the developed methods of treating cancer in preclinical studies, the expected success in clinical practice has not been achieved yet. Due to the shortcoming of chemotherapy, dose limits, side effects, and low selectivity for cancer cells, detection of much more efficient, harmless and highly selective antitumor drugs are required in urgent. So, now the research has been focused towards the development of novel anticancer drugs from the natural products. Nature has been instrumental as a source for therapeutics. Marine floras are extremely important oceanic resources, constituting over 90% of the oceanic biomass. They are taxonomically diverse, largely productive, biologically active, and chemically unique offering a great scope for discovery of new anticancer drugs. With the implementation of scuba diving tools and the development of sophisticated instruments for the isolation and elucidation of structures of natural products from marine organisms, major advances have been made in the discovery of marine derived therapeutics. Marine secondary metabolites are a promising source of unexploited drugs that have a wide structural diversity and have shown a variety of biological activities. These compounds are produced in response to the harsh and competitive conditions that occur in the marine environment. The compounds have displayed an array of pharmacological properties especially antioxidant, immune stimulatory, and antitumour activities. Due to the potential bioactivity of the natural products isolated marine microorganism, they represent a hopeful resource for discovering new anticancer drugs.

Keywords: Anticancer, Marine Organisms.