Acteoside in Cancer Therapy: Integrating Ethnomedicinal Insights with Bibliometric Analysis
Abstract
Cancer remains a major global health challenge, accounting for nearly one in six deaths worldwide, with treatment often limited by drug resistance, tumour heterogeneity, and therapy-related side effects. Natural plant-derived compounds have gained attention as potential therapeutic leads owing to their structural diversity and multi-targeted mechanisms. Acteoside (Verbascoside), a phenylethanoid glycoside obtained from medicinal plants, exhibits diverse biological and promising anticancer effects. However, information on acteoside remains scattered across phytochemical, pharmacological, and experimental studies. This review integrates current evidence to provide a comprehensive overview of acteoside in cancer research. Literature retrieval for this study was conducted using the Scopus database due to its extensive coverage of peer-reviewed journals, robust metadata indexing, and suitability for ethnopharmacological, bibliometric, and pharmacognostic analyses. The study included four analytical components, viz., cataloguing plant sources of acteoside to establish a pharmacognostic repository, bibliometric analysis of acteoside-related cancer research (1990-2024) to identify trends, mapping of cancer types investigated in acteoside studies, and predictive acteoside-disease target mapping using network pharmacology to evaluate oncological relevance. The former two analyses highlight the broad botanical distribution of acteoside and increasing interest in its anticancer potential. Cancer-type mapping showed investigations across multiple malignancies. Predictive acteoside-disease target mapping revealed that cancer exhibited the highest number of connections with acteoside-associated targets. These findings reinforce the growing relevance of acteoside in cancer research. Overall, this integrative overview provides a foundation for future experimental and translational research on acteoside as a promising natural anticancer lead.