Plant-derived natural coumarins with anticancer potentials: future and challenges

This review provides an extensive summary of the anticancer property of new natural coumarins. These coumarins comprise simple coumarin, furanocoumarin, pyranocoumarin, isocoumarin and miscellaneous coumarin. This review aims to focus on the natural sources, structures, metabolism in the body, anticancer potential, mechanism, structure activity relationship and health risk of the reported coumarins. This review article has been prepared using data retrieved from the search engines Google Scholar, Science Direct and Pubmed. Keywords used to search included cytotoxic coumarins, anticancer coumarins, new natural coumarins, coumarins with antiproliferative activity, all in various combinations. A detailed bibliographic search was performed and among the titles identified by the search, only the titles with new natural coumarins showing anticancer property were taken for the review. The appropriate data was arranged into the manuscript accordingly and discussed. Plant-derived Coumarins can inhibit the growth, proliferation and metastasis of various cancer cells by a variety of molecular mechanism. All these mechanistic study proved natural coumarins are indeed potential anticancer agents with diverse mechanism. 135 new natural coumarins reported from 2005 to Mid 2022 are taken for the discussion. The anticancer activities of the reported coumarins are discussed in detail. The mechanism and structure-activity relationships are also discussed. Some significantly active coumarins are also discussed in this review. The author anticipates that this compilation would surely boost the ongoing research on anticancer activities of plant-derived new coumarins and help us to find the new anticancer agents from natural coumarins.