Derivados da Shikonina com potencial anticâncer: uma revisão integrativa.

Abstract

Despite notable advances in pharmacological cancer therapy, this remains a public health problem worldwide, given current morbidity and mortality statistics, as well as projections for the future. That said, the objective of the present work is to retrieve information in the literature about the potential of shikonine derivatives in the treatment of cancer. To this end, an integrative review of articles published in PubMed, VHL, Science Direct and SciELO between 2017 and 2021 was carried out. terms “Shikonin” and “Shikonin derivatives” using the Boolean operators “AND” and “OR”. Of the 328 publications found, 12 were included in the search after the search process. In all, 195 shikonine derivatives were evaluated by the included studies, and, after screening, 13 obtained promising results and proceeded to carry out further experiments to elucidate the mechanism of action. Compared to shikonine, most of these compounds showed better antiproliferative activity against cancer cell lines, in addition to being less toxic to non-cancerous cells, thus representing greater selectivity of the derivatives. In addition to this, other in vitro experiments have shown that all shikonine derivatives act by one or more of the following mechanisms: induction of apoptosis, alteration of mitochondrial membrane potential, interruption of the cell cycle in the G1 or G2/M phase, inhibition of tubulin polymerization and cell migration. Regarding the in vivo results, the studies revealed that the tested compounds had a promising effect on tumor reduction, as well as did not change physical and biochemical parameters in the animal models studied. Based on this information, it appears that shikonine-derived compounds have promising anticancer activity and can be the target of research aimed at the development of new drugs.