Progress in Nitrogen and Oxygen-based Heterocyclic Compounds for their Anticancer Activity: An Updates (2017-2020)

 Cancer, which is spreading throughout the world, is quickly becoming the leading cause of major fatalities. The most difficult task for global researchers today is to develop anticancer leads with minimal side effects. Heterocyclic chemistry is an important and unique class of medicinal chemistry as a large number of drugs being used in chemotherapy have a heterocyclic ring as their basic structure, in spite of various side effects. Because of the presence of heteroatoms such as oxygen, nitrogen, and sulphur, heterocyclic compounds can be used as hydrogen bond donors and acceptors. As a result, they can more effectively bind to pharmacological targets and receptors via intermolecular hydrogen bonds, resulting in pharmacological effects. They can also change the liposolubility and thus the aqueous solubility of drug molecules, resulting in remarkable pharmacotherapeutic properties. Medicinal chemists are concentrating on anticancer agents based on heterocyclic compounds. The goal of this chapter is to attempt to compile a dataset of advances in various nitrogen and oxygen-containing heterocyclic rings with anticancer activities from 2017 to 2020. The chapter covered the most recent research on novel anticancer heterocyclic derivatives, as well as the structure-activity relationship (SAR). The chapter provides the reader with advanced knowledge of the strategies required for designing nitrogen- and oxygen-containing heterocyclic compounds as anticancer agents.

Keywords: Anticancer drugs, Cancer, Heterocyclic, Nitrogen, Oxygen, SAR.