Nature is the best source of anticancer drugs: Indexing natural products for their anticancer bioactivity

PLoS One. 2017 Nov 9;12(11):e0187925. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187925. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Cancer is considered one of the primary diseases that cause morbidity and mortality in millions of people worldwide and due to its prevalence, there is undoubtedly an unmet need to discover novel anticancer drugs. However, the traditional process of drug discovery and development is lengthy and expensive, so the application of in silico techniques and optimization algorithms in drug discovery projects can provide a solution, saving time and costs. A set of 617 approved anticancer drugs, constituting the active domain, and a set of 2,892 natural products, constituting the inactive domain, were employed to build predictive models and to index natural products for their anticancer bioactivity. Using the iterative stochastic elimination optimization technique, we obtained a highly discriminative and robust model, with an area under the curve of 0.95. Twelve natural products that scored highly as potential anticancer drug candidates are disclosed. Searching the scientific literature revealed that few of those molecules (Neoechinulin, Colchicine, and Piperolactam) have already been experimentally screened for their anticancer activity and found active. The other phytochemicals await evaluation for their anticancerous activity in wet lab.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Antineoplastic Agents / chemistry*
  • Antineoplastic Agents / therapeutic use
  • Computer Simulation
  • Drug Discovery / methods*
  • Humans
  • Molecular Structure
  • Neoplasms / drug therapy*
  • Phytochemicals / chemistry*
  • Phytochemicals / therapeutic use
  • ROC Curve
  • Stochastic Processes
  • Structure-Activity Relationship

Substances

  • Antineoplastic Agents
  • Phytochemicals

Grants and funding

This work was funded by an unrestricted research grants from Al-Qasemi Academic College and the Ministry of Science, Space and Technology. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.