Natural products as inhibitors against pancreatic cancer cell proliferation and invasion: possible mechanisms.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the gastrointestinal tumors with the lowest survival rate and the worst prognosis. At the time of diagnosis, the majority of patients have missed the opportunity for radical surgical resection and opt for chemotherapy as their primary treatment choice. And drug resistance emerges during the application of the most widely used chemotherapeutic regimens such as modified FOLFIRINOX regimen, gemcitabine monotherapy or 5-Fluorouracil combination therapy, which further reduces the therapeutic efficacy. Therefore, it is urgent to explore better treatment strategies for pancreatic cancer. In recent years, more and more studies have found that natural products have significant anti-pancreatic cancer properties. In this paper, we reviewed the possible mechanisms by which natural products inhibit the proliferation and invasion of pancreatic cancer cells, including the possible mechanisms of targeting the inhibition of the growth and proliferation regulatory pathways of pancreatic cancer cells, inducing apoptosis and autophagy of pancreatic cancer cells, inhibiting the EMT process of pancreatic cancer cells, and inhibiting the angiogenesis of pancreatic cancer. Meanwhile, natural products have also hindered the progress of their basic and clinical research due to the complexity of their composition and the limitation of biological extraction technology. Further exploration of the specific molecular mechanisms of natural products to inhibit the proliferation and invasion of pancreatic cancer cells, optimization of purification and preparation techniques, and enrichment of basic and clinical trials to verify their efficacy and safety may be the future direction of natural products in the field of anti-pancreatic cancer research.