The Anticancer Effect of Phytochemicals and Potential of Breynia cernua: An overview

Cancer treatment still has challenges from its expense, side effect, and survival rate. One of the actions to improve this is searching for new anticancer agents. Medicinal plants are a candidate source since they have traditionally been used to treat illness. Phytochemicals of medicinal plants play a significant role in exhibiting anticancer effects. Literature studies of the phytochemicals of existing medicinal plants can be a clue to finding out the potential other plants whose studies are still limited, such as Breynia cernua, a plant with anticancer effects used traditionally. This study will provide information on the phytochemicals effect of medicinal plants or other compounds against cancer and their anticancer mechanisms. The agents are collected based on their compound's group, and each group's anticancer mechanism is resumed. The results showed that phytochemicals (flavonoids, alkaloids, saponins, quinone, tannins, and terpenoids) affect cancer cell through variant mechanism; induction of apoptosis, inhibition of cell growth, inhibition of cell migration, and induction of autophagic pathway. Most of the studies used methanol extracts, and most showed very strong toxicity to cancer cells. For further study, we suggest using isolated compounds from methanol, ethanol, or N-hexane extracts of Breynia cernua to get better anticancer activity, especially compounds belonging to the flavonoid or quinone group.