Diterpenos com atividade antitumoral frente células leucêmicas: uma revisão.

Abstract

The use of plants for medicinal purposes to treat, cure and prevent disease, is one of the olde st medicinal practices of mankind. P lants represent the largest sources of active substances that can be used in therapy due to the high structural diversity of metabolites produced and , because of this, they are the oldest source of drugs for humans. Plan ts produce many compounds of low and high molecular weight classified as primary and secondary metabolites. Cancer can be considered a complex genetic disease that results from simultaneous changes in genes generally related to proliferation, differentiati on and cell death, and is characterized by uncontrolled and unplanned growth of some cells. The aim of this study is to review the action of antitumor diterpenes against leukemic cells from a survey of data about their activi ties in experimental procedures . In this review , it was list ed 862 in vitro studies of diterpenes against leukemic cells from 27 different lineages, with 84.7% of diterpenes showing some activity against leukemia cells studied. No in vivo test was found during the search. Among the dite rpenes studied, taxol stands out for presenting activity in all studies ahead leukemic cells. This revision was based on the database NAPRALERT. In this review, 269 references were cited.