Hymecromone and Its Products as Cytotoxic Candidates for Brain Cancer: A Brief Review

Abstract

Brain cancer is the 10th cause of death among patients suffering from cancer worldwide. Despite the huge effort put out to extract, design, and synthesize novel chemotherapeutic drugs, medicinal chemists continue to face significant obstacles due to considerable side effects, growing tumor resistance, and poor selectivity. In recent decades, great attention has been paid to the anti-cancer potential of a variety of natural compounds. Coumarin-based compounds, for example, are distinguished by their structural variety and wide range of pharmacological characteristics. Among these, hymecromone, also known as 7-hydroxy-4-methylcoumarin, and its derivatives have shown promise in the treatment of multi-drug cancer resistance, the decrease of chemotherapeutic drug side effects, and the creation of photo-directed cancer therapy. Furthermore, numerous synthetic hymecromone-derived compounds have been demonstrated to have a broad antitumor potential, making them effective against a variety of cancers including leukemia, prostate cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and brain cancer. In this review article, the authors evaluated the findings of a number of recently published scientific studies in order to emphasize the structural properties of hymecromone-derived compounds that are crucial in their potential as antitumor agents for brain cancer. The specification of these qualities might help guide future research towards the design and synthesis of newer chemotherapeutic drugs with improved features.