Lawsone (2-hydroxy-1,4-naphthaquinone) derived anticancer agents

2-Hydroxy-1,4-naphthaquinone, commonly known as lawsone, represents an extremely important biologically active naturally occurring compound. It can easily be isolated from Lawsonia inermis (henna) tree leaf extract. Last decade has seen tremendous applications of lawsone as a starting component for the preparation of various organic scaffolds. Many of these synthesized scaffolds showed a wide range of biological activities including potential activities towards several cancer cell lines. This review deals with diverse synthetic methods of lawsone derived scaffolds and their screening against different anti-cancer cell lines along with promising results.

Synthesis of Biologically Active Molecules through Multicomponent Reactions

Focusing on the literature progress since 2002, the present review explores the highly significant role that multicomponent reactions (MCRs) have played as a very important tool for expedite synthesis of a vast number of organic molecules, but also, highlights the fact that many of such molecules are biologically active or at least have been submitted to any biological screen. The selected papers covered in this review must meet two mandatory requirements: (1) the reported products should be obtained via a multicomponent reaction; (2) the reported products should be biologically actives or at least tested for any biological property. Given the diversity of synthetic approaches utilized in MCRs, the highly diverse nature of the biological activities evaluated for the synthesized compounds, and considering their huge structural variability, much of the reported data are organized into concise schemes and tables to facilitate comparison, and to underscore the key points of this review.