Bioprospecting natural products to find prominent agents for medical application is an area of scientific endeavor that has produced many clinically used bioactive compounds, including
anticancer agents. These compounds come from plants, microorganisms, and marine life. They are so-called secondary metabolites that are important for a species to survive in the hostile environment of its respective ecosystem. The kingdom of Plantae has been an important source of
traditional medicine in the past and is also enormously used today as an exquisite reservoir for detecting novel bioactive compounds that are potent against hard-to-treat maladies such as
cancer.
Cancer therapies, especially
chemotherapies, are fraught with many factors that are difficult to manage, such as drug resistance, adverse side effects, less selectivity, complexity, etc. Here, we report the results of an exploration of the databases of PubMed, Science Direct, and Google Scholar for bioactive anticancer
phytochemicals published between 2010 and 2020. Our report is restricted to new compounds with strong-to-moderate bioactivity potential for which mass spectroscopic structural data are available. Each of the
phytochemicals reported in this review was assigned to chemical classes with peculiar anticancer properties. In our survey, we found anticancer
phytochemicals that are reported to have selective toxicity against
cancer cells, to sensitize MDR
cancer cells, and to have multitarget effects in several signaling pathways. Surprisingly, many of these compounds have limited follow-up studies. Detailed investigations into the synthesis of more functional derivatives, chemical genetics, and the clinical relevance of these compounds are required to achieve safer
chemotherapy.