Unveiling promising bioactives for breast cancer: a novel approach for herbal-based drug discovery

Breast cancer (BC) is a complex disease that manifests with a malignancy of the mammary gland. Globally, the year 2020 witnessed 2.3 million diagnosis cases and 685,000 deaths due to breast cancer. Therefore, there is a dire need for the development of new anticancer drugs for BC. Traditional herbal medicine offers a rich source in the prospect of new drug discovery. In this pursuit, this review covers the discovery of compounds against breast cancer with the possible mechanisms of action, which can assist the development of novel phytomedicines in the drug discovery process. Specifically, the bioactives against breast cancer developed from 1999 to 2023 were categorized based on their chemical class based on a systematic search on PubMed and Embase. Over 70 + natural products belonging to different chemical classes and their mechanisms of action for anticancer activity with commonly used drugs in clinical practice are summarized for a simple understanding of the experimental data. The review draws attention to the vital need to isolate novel bioactive constituents and to develop new drugs based on these isolated bioactives using novel drug delivery systems, so as to increase the target specificity and thereby reduce the adverse effects.Finally, we highlighted the natural bioactives undergoing preclinical and clinical trials to determine their potential for use in the treatment of BC, which could pave the way towards new target-specific drugs against breast cancer.