Triterpenoids as anticancer drugs from marine sponges

Abstract

Natural products provide an important source of new therapeutic drugs and biochemical tools. In the last decades researchers of natural products chemistry focused their research in a wide variety of bioactive compounds from marine species. Marine sponges have been considered as a very fertile field for the discovery of bioactive natural chemical substances with respect to the diversity of their primary and secondary chemical components and metabolites. Triterpenoids are the most abundant secondary metabolite present in marine sponges. A large number of triterpenoids are known to exhibit cytotoxicity against a variety of tumor cells as well as anticancer efficacy in preclinical animal models. Therefore, triterpenoids from marine sponges leads to be used in the pharmaceutical industry as new chemical classes of anticancer agents.