an overview of quercetin anticancer mechanisms

Cancer is considered a major obstacle to increasing life expectancy owing to its rapidly rising incidence and mortality rates (ferlay et al., 2019). it involves complex biological mechanisms such as growth-promoting signals, triggering angiogenesis, and prompting invasion and metastasis, all of which make its treatment intensely complicated (hanahan & weinberg, 2000). quercetin (que; 3,5,7,3′,4′-pentahydroxyflavone), a major flavonoid found in fruits and vegetables (stavric, 1994), exhibits biological effects such as antioxidant, anti-carcinogenic, and anti-inflammatory effects (carullo et al., 2019). cancer cells engage in competition with other cell types to acquire essential nutrients for development; however, due to the nutrient-limited tumor environment, they must find alternative pathways to meet energy demands for proliferation and cell growth. one such mechanism is aerobic glycolysis, which cancer cells utilize to produce energy. although aerobic glycolysis produces only 2 atp molecules per molecule of glucose, compared to the 36 atp molecules generated by oxidative phosphorylation, cancer cells produce high levels of carbon-rich metabolites that can serve as precursors for de novo synthesis of nucleotides, lipids, or amino acids (de berardinis & chandel, 2016). the phosphoinositide 3-kinase/protein kinase b (pi3k/akt) pathway governs the mechanism of metabolic reprogramming, which in turn triggers an increase in glucose uptake and glycolysis (tennant et al., 2010). the main anticancer effect of que is based on its ability to suppress the mitotic process by regulating pro-apoptotic, pi3k/akt, and mitogen-activated protein kinase (mapk) molecular pathways (reyes-farias & carrasco-pozo, 2019). furthermore, que demonstrates the ability to suppress the rise in h2o2 -induced reactive oxygen species (ros) and significantly downregulate the phosphorylation of akt, pdk1, bcl-2-associated death promoter (bad), and the level of tumor necrosis factor receptor 1 (tnfr1) (maurya & vinayak, 2016). owing to its diverse anticancer pathways, que holds promise as an anti-cancer agent.