Abstract
Cancer, caused by uncontrolled cell growth in any part of the body, is a
significant life-threatening burden for the growing civilization. Though cancer research
has reached a high level, considering the high cost of the available therapies to treat
various cancers, the morbidity and mortality rates are still high. Organ toxicity, lack of
cell specificity, drug resistance, and short half-life with adverse side effects are the
major hurdles associated with currently used therapeutics. Therefore, there is a high
need to search for new anticancer agents with minimal side effects and toxicity. In this
connection, nature always acts as a treasury for scientists by offering its natural sources
to fight the war against various life-harvesting diseases. Nowadays, hybrid molecule
drug designs attract much attention among organic and medicinal chemists. What is
more interesting about the hybrid molecule is that, depending upon the target diseasecreating protein, scientists are designing and optimising the target molecule by
considering their structure-activity relationship studies (SARs). Among the different
natural sources, quinoline, quinolone, and their hybrid derivatives are the most
privileged ones. They are found as the central core of many bioactive natural products
as well as drug molecules (camptothecin, bosutinib, cabozantinib, pelitinib, lenvatinib,
levofloxacin, voreloxin, ciprofloxacin, garenofloxacin, etc.) acting as anticancer agents.
Literature is enriched with the excellent achievements of hybrid quinoline and
quinolone derivatives which function as anticancer agents through various mechanisms
such as Bcl-2 inhibition, ALDH inhibition, kinase inhibition, topo-II, and EGFR-TK
inhibition, etc. Given the excellent performance of quinoline and quinolone hybrid
derivatives, it will be worthwhile to continue researching them.
Keywords: Anticancer, Hybrid, Quinoline, Quinolone, SARs.