SCORPION VENOM AND ITS COMPONENTS AS NEW PHARMACEUTICAL APPROACH TO CANCER TREATMENT, A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

The use of scorpion venom has a very old history in traditional medicine for thousands years ago in China, India and Africa worldwide. The inhibition of cancer progression and induce apoptosis have shown in an increasing number in-vitro and in-vivo studies. We accomplished this systematic review to evaluate the performance of scorpion venom and its components in the growth inhibition of cancer cell lines. To provide a full data for future researches, the in-vitro and in-vivo studies were adopted in this research. The literature search for the published articles from January 1^st, 1968 to January 1^th, 2018 was done in PubMed, ISI Web of Science, Scopus, and Science Direct. All the articles were independently screened by applying some predefined criteria by two reviewers in three consecutive steps. We identified 53 eligible studies from among 1,209 studies. So far, scorpion venom and its components have been discovered to inhibit the growth of 38 various types of cancer cell lines. This was the first systematic review includes some tables that provided some valuable information to the reader on the therapeutic properties of scorpion venom and its components in the sphere of cancer treatment. We found some studies showing that these agents have been able to inhibit the growth of cancer cell lines, while having no effects on the normal cells using the same doses. The findings of this research strongly reinforced the hypothesis that these agents provide a new efficient approach to cancer treatment.