Nitrogen Containing Heterocycles as Anticancer Agents: An Overview.

BACKGROUND Cancer is spreading all over the world and it is becoming leading cause of major deaths. Today's most difficult task for every researcher is to invent a new drug that can treat cancer with minimal side effects. Many factors including pollution, modern lifestyle and food habits, exposure to oncogenic agents or radiations, enhanced industrialization etc. are causing cancer. Treatment of cancer is done by various methods that include chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery and immunotherapy in combination or singly along with kinase inhibitors. Most of the anti-cancer drugs use concept of kinase inhibition. OBJECTIVE Number of drugs being used in chemotherapy has heterocycles as their basic structure inspite of various side effects. Medicinal chemists are focusing on nitrogen containing heterocyclic compounds like pyrrole, pyrrolidine, pyridine, imidazole, pyrimidines, pyrazole, indole, quinoline, oxadiazole, azole, benzimidazole etc. as the key building blocks to develop biological active compounds. The aim of this study is to try an attempt to compile a dataset of nitrogen containing heterocyclic anti-cancer drugs. METHODS We adopted a structural search on notorious journal publication websites and electronic databases such as Bentham, Science Direct, PubMed, Scopus, USFDA etc. for the collection of peer-reviewed research and review articles for the present review. The quality papers were retrieved, studied, categorized into different sections, analyzed and used for article writing. CONCLUSION As per FDA databases nitrogen-based heterocycles in the drug design is almost 60% of unique smallmolecule drugs. Some of the nitrogen containing heterocyclic anti-cancer drugs are Axitinib, Bosutinib, Cediranib, Dasatanib (Sprycel®), Erlotinib (Tarceva®), Gefitinib (Iressa®), Imatinib (Gleevec®), Lapatinib (Tykerb®), Linifanib, Sorafenib (Nexavar®), Sunitinib (Sutent®), Tivozanib etc. In the present review, we shall focus on the overview of nitrogen containing heterocyclic active compounds as anti-cancer agents.