Recent Advances and Developments of in vitro Evaluation of Heterocyclic Moieties on Cancer Cell Lines

Besides worthy development in cancer therapy, cancer is still one of the leading causes of death, worldwide. The future burden of cancer will probably be even larger because people are adopting poor lifestyles with poor diet, frequently smoking and less physical activity. The effective anticancer drugs having efficacy and selectivity with low toxicity is still a challenge for the scientific fraternity. The advances in the cancer study have its origin on the availability of different types of experimental model systems that review the various forms of this disease. Cell lines emerge as a feasible alternative for anticancer activities, being at the same time easy to manipulate and molecularly characterize. Heterocycles are key structural components of many of the anti-cancer drugs available on the market today. Indeed, of the novel molecular anti-cancer agents approved by the FDA between 2010 and 2017, almost two-thirds contained heterocyclic rings within their structures. This review summarizes and provides updated literature on heterocyclic compounds using various cancer cell lines reported during the period of 2014-2017 together with the structure-activity relationships.