Book

The Cucurbitaceae stands among the rare plant families whose metabolites both feed large human populations and exert medicinal effects. The cucurbitane scaffold, which renders wild gourds bitter to fend off herbivores, induces haemorrhagic colitis at milligram doses; at nanomolar levels, it suppresses STAT3, drives ferroptosis in lung cancer cells, and underpins semi-synthetic anticancer strategies. Cucurbitacin B alone reportedly targets eighteen proteins and elicits cell death via five distinct pathways. Most existing cucurbit pharmacology reviews merely catalogue compounds, signalling pathways and cancer types. This volume adopts an alternative framework: it groups metabolites by chemical class (not disease), analysing each class through a unified five-part structure — chemistry, biosynthesis, molecular targets, regulated cell death, and translational bottlenecks. This standardised format enables direct cross-compound comparison and pinpoints where evidence becomes weak. Its ten chapters address cucurbitacins; sweet-tasting mogrosides built on the same core scaffold; gypenosides and their ginseng-like bioactivity; nitrogenous constituents including trigonelline, cucurbitin and the favism risk; ribosome-inactivating proteins; pectins and dietary fibre; and lipophilic micronutrients (lycopene, citrulline, squalene, α-eleostearic acid). A core thesis unifies these sections: nearly all published work omits target-site free concentrations. This gap, far more than limited molecular targets, accounts for the sparse clinical translation after fifteen years of encouraging preclinical results. The final chapter outlines five hurdles for cucurbit bioactives — exposure, selectivity, target specificity, safety, and the food–drug divide — and proposes ten research questions tractable with existing tools. Two appendices supply twenty-six compound monographs plus a checklist to assess new bioactivity claims. Targeting natural-product chemists, pharmacologists, food scientists and plant breeders, this is the first book framing cucurbit pharmacology as an integrated biological problem rather than a disconnected inventory of bioactivity data.