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. 2020 May 29;15:55. doi: 10.1186/s13020-020-00338-6

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 1 — The origin, evolvement and molecular formula of norcantharidin (NCTD). Mylabris, also known as Spanish fly, is a traditional Chinese medicine. Cantharidin (CTD), a 7-oxabicyclo [2.2.1] heptane-2, 3-dicarboxylic acid derivative, a natural toxin and the active ingredient with antitumor properties extracted from a traditional Chinese medicine Mylabris. NCTD (7-oxabicyclo [2.2.1] heptane-2, 3-dicarboxylic anhydride), with a molecular formula of C₈H₈O₄ and formula weight of 168.15 g/mol, is the demethylated analog and the low-cytotoxic derivative of CTD with antitumor properties