Phthalimides Represent a Promising Scaffold for Multi-Targeted Anticancer Agents

From the last two decades, phthalimide analogues received prime interest from scientists due to its potent inhibitory action on different cancer-causing receptors. A variety of anticancer drugs are coming into the market but challenges of drug resistance, toxicities, and failure in therapy still remain. Cancer is a group of complex disorders it involves multiple receptors. So there is a need of targeting multiple receptors to get desired potent anticancer drugs with minimum harmful effects. Phthalimide scaffolds fit into these criteria as it is extensively reported for the inhibition of different cancer receptors such as VEGFR, HDAC, EGFR, TNF-alpha, etc. The multi-targeted mechanism of phthalimide derivatives plays a major role in anticancer therapy. Due to this advantage, there is the hope of developing some novel effective multi-targeted anticancer agents. Consider structural features and pharmacological advancement of phthalimide analogues may fulfill the current need of cancer patients. In this review, we covered history, chemistry, SAR, anticancer mechanisms, and the current status of phthalimide derivatives reported till 2022. The article specifically focused on different cancer-causing receptors inhibited by phthalimide derivatives and their mechanism of action in brief. Finally, we provided the future scope and role of phthalimide derivatives in multi-targeted anticancer drug discovery.