Promising leads against lung cancer from the plants in Lamiaceae family.

Introduction: Ceaselessly, management of cancer has been the major global challenge for healthcare professionals. As regards, lung cancer (LC) has been introduced as the second most common form of cancer in both men and women, taking the lives of more than a million people each year, statistically holding the highest mortality rate among all cancer types. Although much effort has been made for the management of LC, current therapies are quite ineffective. With reference to the fact that the most current chemotherapeutic agents for LC are of plant origin, the authors hereby collected the acclaimed plants from the Lamiaceae family which have shown remarkable activity against LC.

Methods: The incorporated papers were published between the years of 1997 and 2023. The principal search keywords for this review article were "lung cancer", "Lamiaceae", "cytotoxic effect", "anti-tumor" and "anti-proliferative" in Medline, Springer, Scopus, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar databases.

Results: To the furthest extent, different responsible mechanism(s) of action for the anti-cancer properties of each plant are discussed. The respected IC₅₀ values for plant extracts, essential oils or pure isolated compounds are underlined as well.

Conclusion: Many plants and isolated relative phytochemicals have shown exceptional anti-cancer potency against LC; nonetheless, they still remain undisclosed. We believe that this assembled data would globally inspire scientists on the passing way of LC treatment.