Brain cancer is the 10th cause of death among patients suffering from cancer worldwide. Despite the huge effort put out to extract, design, and synthesize novel chemotherapeutic drugs, medicinal chemists continue to face significant obstacles due to considerable side effects, growing tumor resistance, and poor selectivity. In recent decades, great attention has been paid to the anti-cancer potential of a variety of natural compounds. Coumarin-based compounds, for example, are distinguished by their structural variety and wide range of pharmacological characteristics. Among these, hymecromone, also known as 7-hydroxy-4-methylcoumarin, and its derivatives have shown promise in the treatment of multi-drug cancer resistance, the decrease of chemotherapeutic drug side effects, and the creation of photo-directed cancer therapy. Furthermore, numerous synthetic hymecromone-derived compounds have been demonstrated to have a broad antitumor potential, making them effective against a variety of cancers including leukemia, prostate cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and brain cancer. In this review article, the authors evaluated the findings of a number of recently published scientific studies in order to emphasize the structural properties of hymecromone-derived compounds that are crucial in their potential as antitumor agents for brain cancer. The specification of these qualities might help guide future research towards the design and synthesis of newer chemotherapeutic drugs with improved features.

Many efforts have been directed toward the isolation of natural products, and using them to synthesize new chemical agents, and explore their cytotoxic attributes. However, finding new chemotherapeutic agents with towering potentials in the terms of high activity and target-selectivity, as well as minimal side effects is still out of hand. To satisfy that, medicinal chemists directed much of their research toward screening the cytotoxic activity of the isolated products and synthetic compounds. One of the most investigated bands of compounds is those belong to coumarin-family. Although most of these family members exhibited characteristic cytotoxic attributes, the compound termed 4-methylumbelliferone and chemically named 7-hydroxy-4-methylcoumarin showed, with its derived compounds, an exceptional activity in cancer therapy. This effect included the ability of these compounds to counteract the mechanisms of the multidrug-tumor resistance, cover the side potentials of the currently used chemotherapeutic drugs, and boost the tumor sensitivity to phototherapy. In this report, we browsed the literature to report the recent advances for the application of 4-methylumbelliferone and its derived compounds as cytotoxic agents and identify the structural requirements for the maximum selectivity versus each cancer-phenotype. The outcomes of this report may help in the direction of research toward designing and synthesizing new 4-methylumbelliferone-derived products exhibiting the best selectivity and green-side potentials.

The target of this review study is to highlight the importance of cantabiline and its derived compound as antibacterial agents. Also, to take into consideration the characteristic structural features that can enhance the capability of these compounds to fight pathogenic bacteria. Methods: The recently available reports concerning the antibacterial activity of cantabiline-derived compounds have been reviewed efficiently. The outcomes of these reports have been also analyzed to detect the proper substituents that can enhance the target activity. Results: The hand-availability of antibacterial agents, as well as their inadvisable utilization, resulted in a mounting health problem named multidrug resistant bacterial strains. To handle this emerging issue, the design and synthesis of agents with a powerful ability to fight such bacterial strains is becoming a pressing need. Conclusion:This review study has concluded that cantabiline and its derived compounds may represent hopeful antibacterial agents. Also, they can address several mechanisms acquired by bacteria for resisting the currently-available antibacterial agents.