Alantolactone: structural enhancements and therapeutic insights for cancer and inflammation

Alantolactone (ATL) is a bioactive sesquiterpene lactone derived from medicinal plants that exhibits numerous biological activities, especially its anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties. The review examines the current evidence on ATL's bioactivity and details how ATL functions across various cancer cell lines (breast, lung, gastric, pancreatic, bone and liver cancers) and inflammation processes. The clinical application of ATL faces limitations due to its inadequate solubility in water and non-selectively binding to non-target proteins. Therefore, we summarised existing structural transformation methods, including acid-catalyzed, oxidative, reductive reactions, cycloaddition, rearrangement of lactone ring, Aza-Michael, cross-coupling and click reactions that might further promote to overcome these limitations. This work presents ATL as an effective anticancer natural product and reviews the last decade of anti-tumour and inflammatory activities, with the mechanism of actions and gives the main points of existing structural optimisation techniques which may assist the researchers to improve effectiveness while minimising negative side effects.