Repurposing Drugs as Novel Triple-negative Breast Cancer Therapeutics

Abstract

Background: Among all the types of breast cancer (BC), triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is the most aggressive form having high metastasis and recurrence rate with limited treatment options. Conventional treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy have lots of toxic side effects and also no FDA approved therapies are available till now. Repurposing of old clinically approved drugs towards various targets of TNBC is the new approach with lesser side effects and also leads to successful inexpensive drug development with less time consuming. Medicinal plants containg various phytoconstituents (flavonoids, alkaloids, phenols, essential oils, tanins, glycosides, lactones) plays very crucial role in combating various types of diseases and used in drug development process because of having lesser side effects. Objective: The present review focuses in summarization of various categories of repurposed drugs against multitarget of TNBC and also summarizes the phytochemical categories that targets TNBC singly or in combination with synthetic old drugs. Methods: Literature information was collected from various databases such as Pubmed, Web of Science, Scopus and Medline to understand and clarify the role and mechanism of repurposed synthetic drugs and phytoconstituents aginst TNBC by using keywords like “breast cancer”, “repurposed drugs”, “TNBC” and “phytoconstituents”. Results: Various repurposed drugs and phytochemicals targeting different signaling pathways that exerts their cytotoxic activities on TNBC cells ultimately leads to apoptosis of cells and also lowers the recurrence rate and stops the metastasis process. Conclusion: Inhibitory effects seen in different levels, which provides information and evidences to researchers towards drug developments process and thus further more investigations and researches need to be taken to get the better therapeutic treatment options against TNBC.