Exploring the Potential of Dietary Phytochemicals in Cancer Therapeutics: Modulating Apoptosis and Autophagy

The global incidence of cancer and cancer-related mortality is expected to rise despite advancements in the field of science and technology. Numerous drugs have been tailored to combat the various forms out there, but the limitations in the conventional therapeutic approaches have shifted scientific communities’ attention to an alternative approach. Dietary phytochemicals, bioactive compounds found in plants, have garnered significant attention for their potential role in cancer therapeutics by regulating apoptosis and autophagy. Autophagy, a self-cannibalization process, and apoptosis, the cell’s suicide command, seem to be doors that hold answers to the questions we have been asking all along, and the keys to these doors lie in the pharmacophores hidden in nature just waiting to be discovered. The interplay between apoptosis and autophagy is intricate, with crosstalk between these pathways. Phytochemicals can influence this crosstalk by modulating signaling molecules like AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) and mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR). They and their synthetic analogs have demonstrated remarkable results in modulating apoptosis and autophagy and, coupled with their potential for targeting multiple signaling pathways, highlight their versatility to eradicate cancers in vitro and in vivo, when used individually or in combination with the available treatments. In this chapter, an attempt has been made to elucidate the multi-faceted role of these dietary phytochemicals, against cancer war by modulating apoptosis and autophagy in cancer therapeutics along with recent advances and implications it may have on the therapeutic development of phytochemical-based anticancer drugs.