Conclusions

Cancer remains the second leading cause of death according to American Cancer Society (ACS) reports for 2022, affecting almost ten million people globally and is expected to take a huge toll of >16 million in the next coming decade 2040. Although modern medicine has offered lucrative treatment regimens for the treatment of cancers, which include invasive surgical methods, radiotherapy, chemotherapy followed by radiotherapy or alone, immunotherapy, and hormone therapies, chemotherapy remains the mainstay treatment option. While chemotherapy is known as an efficient way to kill, knock out, or ward off harmful unwanted cancerous cells, it is often seen to affect the healthy or the normal cells, leading to many serious side effects. Many traditional chemotherapeutic drugs were developed in the past, based on various organic pharmacophores such as alkaloids, antibiotics, anthracycline antimetabolites from plant/fungi species or synthetically, and some of them have been proven as potent chemotherapeutic drugs, namely bleomycin, paclitaxel, vinblastine, doxorubicin, and 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), and also remain pertinent to date as combination agents or in advanced target-specific drug delivery systems via carriers such as liposomes, dendrimers, chitosan, etc., for treating many solid malignancies and sarcomas, lymphomas, and leukemia. Nevertheless, there were many pitfalls including synthetic challenges that hindered their journey backstage.