Natural Compounds: Recent Updates in Targeting Colon Cancer Growth and Its Metastasis

Abstract

The treatment of colon cancer (CC) with chemotherapeutics presents significant burden for the patients due to high toxicity and relatively low response. The present review introduces recent updates on global incidence, mortality, screen approaches and adjuvant regimens as well as medicinal plant extracts and their marker compounds as adjuvants for CC. We present the cellular mechanisms and pathways that promote metastasis of CC cells and their colonization in the liver and lungs. This review describes a regulatory loop between the Wnt, Myc, and long non-coding RNAs in promoting metastasis of CC cells. It also identifies the anticancer effects of promising natural compounds mainly on CC cell lines, tumor-bearing animal models and in a clinical trial. This review describes the mechanisms of action of promising polyphenols, flavonoids, terpenes, and alkaloids in the modulation of the metastasis of CC cells to the liver and lung. We also present promising natural compounds that target the Wnt signaling and its target genes in CC. We report few animal and human clinical trials on natural compounds that are evaluated for mitigating CC. The relevance of natural compounds as an adjuvant in monotherapy or combination therapy of CC is discussed. Overall, we provide an overview of natural compounds in CC therapy with future directions.