Natural Products as Anticancer Agents.

Medicinal plants and mushrooms have alwaysfascinated the world as an attractive source of natural compounds for cancer therapy. From ancient times, they have been valued as gourmet food and folk medicine in Oriental practice. For over 40 years, world has witnessed the overwhelming interest of western scientific fraternity in pharmaceutical potential of natural products in combating cancer. The plants and mushrooms credited with success against angiogenesis and cancer metastasis belong to certain Plants including Catharanthus roseus, Aloe Vera,Annona muricata,Curcuma longa, Withania somnifera, and Berberis and mushrooms such as Agaricus,Antrodia,Ganoderma,Grifolafrondosa,Hericiumerinaceus,Phel-linuslinteus, and Trametesversicolor /Coriolusversicolor. The anti-cancer compounds play a pivotal role as free radical scavenger and reactive oxygen species inducer, mitotic spindle kinase inhibitor, anti-mitotic, angiogenesis inhibitor, topoi-somerase inhibitor, apoptosis inducers, and eventually checking cancer invasion, migration and proliferation. The present review updates and focuses on the recent findings of the pharmacologically potential bioactive compounds, their anti-tumor potential, and underlying mechanism of preventing cancer metastasis and angiogenesisin order to raise knowledge for fur-ther investigations to develop cancer therapeutics with no adverse side effects The mounting experimental evidences at pre-clinical and clinical levels from various research groups across the globe, regarding prevention of cancer metastasis by natural products unarguably make it a fast-track research area worth mass attention. Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.net.