A Network Pharmacology Review of Plant-Derived Anticancer Compounds in Lung, Breast, Colorectal and Prostate Cancer

Lung, breast, colorectal and prostate cancer account for over 41% of global cancer incidence and 39% of mortality, yet durable control of advanced disease remains limited. Plant secondary metabolites are promising multitarget leads, but their polypharmacological mechanisms cannot be captured by single-target approaches, and the evidence across these four cancers has not been synthesised within a unified framework. This review provides an integrated comparative analysis of network-pharmacology studies of plant-derived anticancer compounds across the four cancers, cataloguing phytochemical profiles, identifying shared and cancer-specific targets, quantifying the concordance between computational predictions and experimental validation, and appraising the translational gap. A systematic search of biomedical databases (2016–2026) identified 101 peer-reviewed studies (40 breast, 33 colorectal, 24 lung, and 14 prostate) combining network pharmacology with experimental validation. AKT1, EGFR, TP53, STAT3, MAPK1/3, CASP3, and HSP90AA1 recurred as cross-cancer hub genes, with the phosphoinositide 3-kinase/AKT and mitogen-activated protein kinase pathways most frequently implicated. Cancer-specific signatures comprised the androgen receptor in prostate, the oestrogen receptor and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 in breast, β-catenin/Wnt in colorectal, and the epidermal growth factor receptor/RAS axis with epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition effectors in lung cancer. Flavonoids, terpenoids, alkaloids, and polyphenols predominated. The persistent validation gap remains the principal barrier to translation.