The arrival of predictive biomarkers for monitoring therapy response to natural compounds in cancer drug discovery.

Graphical abstract Highlights • Management of cancers in advanced stages is a major challenge in daily practice of oncologists. • Anticancer drugs from natural sources such as trabectedin showed promising activities in randomized and controlled clinical trials. • Cancer biomarkers were recently developed for optimizing the use of these therapeutic agents and predicting their response. Abstract Intrinsic or acquired drug resistance, adverse drug reactions and tumor heterogeneity between and within cancer patients limit the efficacy of clinical management of advanced cancers. To overcome these barriers, predictive biomarkers have recently emerged to guide medical oncologists in the selection of cancer patients who will respond to various anticancer treatments and to improve the toxicity to benefit ratio. Notably, targeted therapy has significantly benefited from these advances, but the application of predictive biomarkers have been a bit slower with some drugs derived from natural sources such as trabectedin, cabazitaxel and alvocidib. In this paper, we discuss some recent advances regarding the use of cancer biomarkers to predict efficacy of some selected natural compounds with a focus on human clinical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]