Table 16.

Summary of findings on the cytotoxic and anti-tumor activity of compounds derived from Sophora species

Compound	Plant species	Cytotoxic and anti-tumor activity	Action	References
Sophoraflavanone G (19)	S. flavescens	Cytotoxicity for several tumor cells	Induces apoptosis in triple-negative breast cancer cells	Huang et al. (2019, 2020), Long et al. (2020)
sophoraflavanone G (19), leachianone A (20), kurarinone (23), 2′-methoxykurarinone (24)	S. flavescens S. davidii	Cytotoxic activity	Against human myeloid leukemia HL-60 cells	Chang et al. (2019a, b), Ma et al. (2021)
Kurarinone (23)	S. flavescens	Cytotoxic	Against human breast cancer	Boozari et al. (2019b)
		Induce apoptosis in small cell lung carcinoma	Promots Fas and TRAIL receptor-1 and -2 expression via the caspase-8/Bid pathway	Chung et al. (2019)
Formononetin (125)		Suppression of tumor growth and angiogenesis	Targets the fibroblast growth factor and protein kinaseB signaling pathway	Elberry et al. (2020)
Exiguaflavanones A (61) and B (62)	S. exigua	Potent anti-breast cancer	MDA-MB- (-231and -468) and MCF-7	Boozari et al. (2019b), Farhadi et al. (2019), Li et al. (2020a), Yang et al. (2020c)
Secundiflorol D (140), secundiflorol E (141), secundiflorol A (154), secundifloran (155)	S. flavescens	Cytotoxic	Cytotoxic activity against human tumor cell lines and normal human cells	Ledoux et al. (2018), Guo et al. (2020)
Maackiain (172)	S. alopecuroides seeds	Cytotoxic	Against MCF-7, Hep3B, HeLa and H1299 cells	Rong et al. (2020), Tsai et al. (2020)
Leachianols (208–211)	S. leachiana	Anti-mitotic activity and cytotoxic effect	Against HeLa cells	Boozari et al. (2019a), Yang et al. (2019)
Sophoridine (240)	S. alopecuroides	Lung cancer cell growth	Through activation of the p53 and Hippo signaling pathways	Zhou et al. (2018d, 2020), ur Rashid et al. (2020)
	Sophoridine (240) hydrochloride injection	Anticancer drugs derived fromtraditional Chinese medicine	It is indicated in nausea lymphoma, gastrointestinal tumor	Yao et al. (2021)
Oxysophoridine (242)	S. alopecuroides	Hepatocellular carcinoma	Suppression of the growth by regulating apoptosis associated with the Bcl-2/Bax/caspase-3 signalling pathway	Yao et al. (2012)
		Colorectal cancer cells	Suppression of the growth by regulating apoptosis associated with the Bcl-2/Bax/caspase-3 signalling pathway	Jin et al. (2017)
Sophoridine (240)	S. flavescens	Gastric cancer	Upregulates CD8 + T cytotoxic function	Zhuang et al. (2020)
		Tumor-suppressive activities	This via promoting ESRRG-mediated β-catenin degradation in gastric cancer	Peng et al. (2020a, b)
Oxysophocarpine (236), matrine (246) and oxymatrine (249)		Colon cancer	Anti-neoplasm mechanisms	Cao and He (2020), Elberry et al. (2020)
Matrine (246)		Hepatocellular carcinoma	Stronger anti-proliferative action on Bel7402 and SMMC-7721 cells under hypoxia than that in normoxia	Dai et al. (2021)
		Colon cancer	Inhibited the proliferation and anchorage-independent growth	Fang et al. (2018)
		Prostate cancer	Inhibit the progression Promoting expression of GADD45B	Huang et al. (2018a)
		Myeloid leukemia	Promots human myeloid leukemia cells apoptosis	Lin et al. (2019b)
		Inhibits the growth of natural killer/T-cell lymphoma cells	Modulating CaMKIIγ-c-Myc signaling pathway	Gu et al. (2020)
		Breast cancer	Reversed multidrug resistance of MCF‐7/ADR cells through PI3K/AKT signaling pathway	Zhou et al. (2018b)
		Anti-proliferation	Inhibition of inhibitory κB kinase β regulation of nuclear factor κB signaling pathway	Cao and He (2020), Zhang et al. (2020a)
	S. moorcroftiana	Colon cancer	Reverse the Warburg effect and suppresses cell growth Negative regulating HIF-1α Triggers colon cancer cell apoptosis and G0/G1 cell cycle arrest	Hong et al. (2019)
	S. alopecuroides	Gastric cancer	Re Inhibits the progression through inhibiting miR‐93‐5p and upregulating the expression of target gene AHNAK	Liu et al. (2020b)
	S. flavescens	Thyroid cancer	Induces papillary thyroid cancer cell apoptosis in vitro and suppresses tumor growth in vivo by downregulating miR-182-5p	Li et al. (2019b), Fu et al. (2020)
Matrine (246)		Nasopharyngeal cancer	Inhibit human nasopharyngeal carcinoma CNE-2 cells	Wang et al. (2018c)
	S. flavescens	Esophageal squamous cancer	Induces apoptosis in KYSE-150 cells -Increases (ROS) and inhibiting mitochondrial function	Jiang et al. (2018)
		Oral squamous cancer	Inhibits the growth of cell carcinoma cells in vitro and in vivo Exhibits it via mediation of microRNA‐22	Li et al. (2019d), ur Rashid et al. (2019), Liu et al. (2020b)
	In Compound Kushen Injection formula (S. flavescens)	Pancreatic cancer	Inhibiting autophagy‐mediated energy metabolism	Cho et al. (2018), Ao et al. (2019), Nourmohammadi et al. (2019), Yao et al. (2021)
Allomatrine (248) inh	S. japonica	Inhibits proliferation and invasion	Promoting apoptosis, inducing ROS production, inhibiting ubiquitin proteasome, arresting cell cycle and regulating tumor related gene expression	Liu et al. (2020a, b)
Matrine (246) and Oxymatrine (249)	S. flavescens	Gastric cancer	Direct killing effects on HepG2, BEL-7402, and SGC-7901 Inhibit the invasion and metastasis of gastric cancer last cells	Huang et al. (2018c), Elberry et al. (2020), Zhang et al. (2020a)
Oxymatrine (249)		Apoptosis- Endothelial injury	The involvement of mitochondria-dependent apoptosis and Akt-eNOS-NO signaling pathways	Wu et al. (2019a)
		Gastric cancer	Suppression of cell proliferation and invasion	Huang et al. (2018c)
			Inhibition of IL-21R-mediated JAK2/STAT3 pathway	Su et al. (2018), Fan et al. (2019)
		A549 human non-small lung cancer cell apoptosis	This via extrinsic and intrinsic pathways	Zhou et al. (2018d), Izdebska et al. (2019)
		Induces dose-dependent cell death of non-small lung cancer	This through ER stress-induced apoptosis pathway	Halim et al. (2019); Izdebska et al. (2019)
		Reverses epithelial-mesenchymal transition in breast cancer cells	This via depressing αVβ3 integrin/FAK/PI3K/Akt signaling activation	Chen et al. (2019c)
		Inhibition of colon cancer cell epithelial-mesenchymal transition and NF-κB signaling	Reverses 5-fluorouracil resistance	Liang et al. (2020)
		Psoriasis vulgaris	Anti-proliferation effect on human skin keratinocytes and suppression of p63 expression	Huang et al. (2018a, b), Aly et al. (2019)
N-methyl cytisine (246)	S. alopecuroides	Breast cancer	Inhibiting breast cancer cell metastasis	Chen et al. (2020a)
Aloperine (284)	S. japonica	Colon cancer	Against multiple myeloma and colon cancer though increasing cell apoptosis	Yin et al. (2018), Li et al. (2020d)
	S. alopecuroides	Ovarian cancer	It induces apoptosis by ROS activation mechanism in human ovarian cancer cells	Qiu et al. (2020a)
		Lung cancer	Compound 284–Adbic (adenoviral vector expressing p14ARF/p53) combined treatment on Non-small cell lung cancer cells synergistically produced induced apoptosis, anti-proliferative effects, and arrested cell cycle at the G1 phase	Muhammad et al. (2020)
		Bladder cancer	It significantly inhibits the viability of bladder cancer cells. This was exerted via suppressing hypoxia induced epithelial-mesenchymal transition activation of mTOR/p70S6K/4E-BP1 pathway	Zhou et al. (2020)
	S. flavescens	Oral squamous cancer	Through the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway	Liu et al. (2019a)
	S. moorcroftiana	Liver cancer	Induces apoptosis and G2/M cell cycle arrest in hepatocellular carcinoma	Liu et al. (2019a, 2020b)
Anagyrine (273)		Cytoxic activity against MCF-7 and HEPG-2	It exhibited IC50 values of 27.3 ± 0.7 and 30.2 ± 0.9 µg/mL against MCF-7 and HEPG-2 cancer cells, respectively	Aly et al. (2021)
Phenolic acids (324–331)	S. tonkinensis	Cytotoxic	Against hepato-cellular carcinoma cell lines, HepG2 and Hep3B	Song et al. (2018), Hou et al. (2020)
Butein (331)	S. tonkinensis	Cytotoxic	Inhibits the cancer cell growth	Song et al. (2018)