Anticancer Natural Products

Dear Colleagues,

Natural products have been invaluable resources for drug discovery. They are promising compound libraries with diverse structural scaffolds and various biological activities. In particular, natural products from microbes, herbal medicines, plants, marine, and other organisms have been extensively explored for their therapeutic potential as anticancer drugs. Looking into the anticancer drugs approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 1981 to 2019, around 25% of them are chemically related to natural compounds, highlighting the great promise in discovering novel drugs from natural products. However, turning natural products into anticancer drugs remains a challenge due to the inherently long workflow involving extraction from natural resources, separation from complicated chemical mixtures, the characterization of structures and biological activities, structural optimization, efficacy evaluation in vitro and in vivo, and phase I/II/III clinical trials.

In light of the rapid development of novel technologies and frontiers in natural product research, we are pleased to invite you to contribute your most relevant work on natural products or derivatives towards cancer therapy to this issue. This Special Issue aims to attract papers on recent progress and innovations at the interface of cancer biology and natural product research. Contributions related to all aspects of anticancer natural product studies including but not limited to natural product discovery, chemical biology of natural products, anticancer efficacy, analytical methods, anticancer mechanism of action, and artificial-intelligence-driven drug discovery are welcome. Both original research articles and reviews are welcome.

Francisca N. de L. Vitorino is a lab supervisor at Washington University in St. Louis, US, in the laboratory of Dr. Benjamin A. Garcia. Her research is focused on the epigenetic effects of a neurohistone mutation on a pediatric neurodevelopmental disease. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, studying the arrest of cancer cell proliferation in response to a growth factor stimulation, validating the theory that the nucleolus has a key function on the senescence phenotype observed in these cells. Additionally, she manages grants for Dr. Benjamin A. Garcia and Dr. Zongtao Tom Lin, and she also manages the lab operation to support various research projects on histone epigenetics analysis by mass spectrometry and proteomics. She will assist Dr Zongtao Tom Lin in managing this Special Issue.

Dr. Zongtao Tom Lin
Guest Editor

Dr. Francisca Vitorino
Guest Editor Assistant

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