Vietnamese medicinal plants as potential anti-cancer agent

Plants have been used as traditional drugs since ancient times and have remained an important source of new drugs and new chemical entities for entering into the pharmaceutical market. Today, many modern drugs in clinical use are derived from plants. The search for bioactive compounds from medicinal plants is often guided by ethnopharmacology and ethnotherapy, which leads to investigations of both crude medicine and plant-derived pharmaceutical agents. We highlight in this chapter the treatment experienced by Vietnamese people and the research of Vietnamese scientists on plants used as anti-cancer drugs and their active principles. Further, we provide the medicinal plants used in Vietnamese Ethnomedicine for the prevention and treatment of cancers, as well as the phytochemical, pharmacological and clinical studies on herbal medicines that are considered anti-cancer agents. Some developed anti-cancer drugs and promising natural compounds are also described