Anticancer Activities and Mechanisms of Traditional Herbal Medicines

Cancer is a multifactorial and multistep group of highly diverse diseases with complicated mechanisms, high mortality, and poor prognosis. Conventional approaches, including radiotherapy or chemotherapy, effectively treat many types of cancer, but they may have adverse side effects on patients. Thus, it is necessary to develop novel therapeutic approaches to cancer. To date, many traditional medicines (including preparations combining different botanical drugs) and isolated natural products have been documented to possess anticancer activities using in vivo approaches or clinical studies. When used in combination with conventional anti-cancer drugs, some traditional medicinal plants can improve patients' therapeutic outcomes, including alleviating side effects or delaying/overcoming drug resistance (adjuvant therapies). However, the detailed molecular mechanism of traditional medicine in tumour suppression have not been fully elucidated. Further investigation is warranted to understand the underlying mechanisms better and identify anti-cancer drugs that may improve cancer patients' survival and quality of life. Artificial intelligence technology has been introduced into drug discovery and applied in almost all aspects of drug development in recent years. We welcome MSs, which add to this small but growing body of scientific literature if they focus on discovering and developing anti-cancer drugs.

This Research Topic aims to discover and develop novel natural compounds, active ingredients, single medicinal plants and combination formulas or prescriptions in traditional medicine with therapeutic selectivity that can be used both for adjuvant and mainline cancer therapy. The RT is open to submissions on plants from all traditional medical systems.

For this Research Topic, we welcome submissions of Original Research, Review, and Clinical Trials, focusing on, but not limited to, the following aspects:
- Underlying mechanisms of traditional medicine for prevention and treatment of solid tumour and leukaemia. In potential anti-cancer agents, only curative aspects will be covered, and cytotoxic/pro-apoptotic (in vitro) effects are excluded as the main focus of MS.
- Development of molecular targets for drug discovery from traditional medicine. For ethnopharmacology, the link to local/traditional uses is essential rather than the random screening of natural products.
- The use of AI in the context of in vivo and clinical research on anti-cancer agents derived from traditional herbal medicines
- Investigation of the efficacy and safety of traditional medicine for cancer therapy based on randomized controlled clinical trials and the combination with western medicine. In the case of alleged anti-cancer agents, there do levels that must be realistic, and their study results should be reproducible and relevant.