Anticancerous plant compounds affecting the Power House of cancerous cells: A possible Herbal Mitocan

Mitochondria are semiautonomous organelles that play an essential role in cellular metabolism and programmed cell death pathways. Emerging evidences suggest that cancer cells exhibit various degrees of mitochondrial dysfunctions and metabolic alterations. Some of those alterations may provide a selective advantage to cells, allowing them to survive and grow under different stresses. Transformed cells have a very different metabolic and mitochondrial function from their normal counterparts. This is the reason that mitochondrial alterations in cancer cells can offer a great opportunity for efficient and selective anticancer therapy. The mechanism of action of mitochondria-targeted anticancer drugs relies on their ability to disrupt the energy-producing systems of cancer cell, mitochondria leading to increased reactive oxygen species, and activation of the mitochondrial-dependent cell death signaling pathways inside cancer cells. This emerging class of drugs is called as mitocans that affect the activities related to mitochondria, such as hexokinase inhibition, electron transport/respiratory chain blockage, activation of the mitochondrial membrane permeability transition pore targeting constituent protein subunits, and inhibition of Bcl-2 anti-apoptotic family proteins and Bax/Bid pro-apoptotic mimetic. A great deal of pharmaceutical research and refinement in the isolation and structure elucidation techniques has been able to identify various anticancer herbs. Many of these herbs are recognized for their valuable bioactive anticancer compounds. A great progress has been further made to identify the role of these active compounds on targeting mitochondria for cancer treatment. The present chapter described the various natural compounds such as curcumin, capsaicin, berberine, sanguinarine, and lamellarin D, which preferentially target the cancer cells by hindering the mitochondrial function via different mechanisms as "herbal mitocans" and also lowering the side effects of other synthetic anticancer drugs in the treatment of cancer.