A review on fucoidan antitumor strategies: from a biological active agent to a structural component of fucoidan-based systems

"Available online 09 March 2020"Due to the severe side-effects and the toxicity to healthy tissues, cancer treatments based in chemotherapy have not fully achieved the desire outcomes so far. The use of natural compound may be of great value to develop better tolerated therapies. Fucoidan is a marine sulfated polysaccharide extracted from brown algae that, besides other biological activities, has been reported to present interesting anti-cancer potential. This review briefly introduces fucoidan chemical structure, physicochemical properties and the above-mentioned biological feature. Fucoidan usage as soluble agent presents promising results herein described for different types of cancer. Trying to enhance and optimize fucoidan usage in the cancer field, different systems, namely drug delivery, have been recently developed to target different types of cancers. This aspect will be presented in detail, highlighting the role of fucoidan on their reported or envisaged performance.This work was developed under the scope of the Structured projects for R&D&I NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000021 and NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000023 supported by the Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), and the Mobilizing Project ValorMar, POCI-01-0247-FEDER-024517, supported by the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalization (COMPETE 2020), under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, co-funded by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The authors would like also to thank NORTE 2020, for financing the PhD scholarship of C.O. “Norte-08-5369-000037” and Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology for the Investigator grant of A.M. (IF/00376/2014)