Anticancer Phytochemicals of 21st Century: A Multitargeted Approach and Role of Humanism in Oncology

Unfortunately, we are living in a century where cancer has become an epidemic that is uncontrollable. Although the plant kingdom has been explored for cancer therapeutics due to its antimutagenic, antioxidant, antiproliferative, and alteration of the human immune system potential; these efforts are still underway due to inadequate knowledge of their biochemical mechanisms and molecular pathways. Phytochemicals exert anticancer activity due to their agonistic and antagonistic potentials on different proteins and enzymes involved in the molecular pathways of cancer. This classical phytotherapy treatment has various pitfalls, such as resistance, side effects, and a lack of target specificity. Because of the target-specificity effects, traditional phytotherapy does not distinguish tumour cells from normal cells. A multitargeted approach, in which a single phytochemical act on different points of the same signalling cascade, plays an important role in this regard. Polypharmacology, system biology, and networking pharmacology are the different terminologies to use to explain in detail the multitargeting approach. Classical phytotherapy is replaced with this multitargeted approach where different “omics” such as genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and various cytogenic technologies are involved. In this chapter, the various multitargeted approaches involved in cancer therapy and the phytochemicals that were prominent in cancer prevention in the 21st century have been explained. At the end of the chapter, the holistic approach to the treatment of oncology has also been emphasized.