Antineoplastic agents natural products

One should consider that plant-derived steroids alone account for about 15% ( 22 billion) of the 150 billion world pharmaceuticals market and that the annual market for taxol exceeded 1 billion in the year 2000. The antineoplastic agents vinblastine and vincristine have sales amounting to 100 million per year the market for psyllium seed products amounts to some 300 million annually and nicotine and scopolamine patches now have combined sales of more than 1 billion per year. It is obvious that natural products continue to play important economic as well as therapeutic roles in modem medicine. 

Review of chemistry and antineoplastic activity 1. Jar dine, Anticancer Agents Based on Natural Product Models, J. M. Cassady, J. D, Douros, Eds. (Academic Press, New York, 1980) pp 319-351. 

The benzodiazepines (177) and (178) are HIV-Tat antagonists and are being evaluated as therapies for the treatment of AIDS <9iscii,799> as is the HIV-1 reverse transcriptase inhibitor nevirapine (179) <90SCI1411>. The natural product azepinomycin (180) is reported to be an antibiotic with antitumour properties <88H(27)ii63> and anthramycin (181) is an antineoplastic agent. 

Plant products have been used extensively in the treatment of malignant disease since thousands of years, but the studies of Dustin in 193 8 on the cytotoxicity of colchicin heralded the start of the search for natural antineoplastic drugs. Today a large number of chemical constituents isolated from naturally occurring plant products have proved to the quite efficacious as antitumour agents. 

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