Sustainable sonochemistry in medicinal heterocycle design: Advances and anticancer implications

One of the powerful tools for sustainable and efficient synthetic strategies in medicinal chemistry is ultrasound-assisted synthesis of heterocyclic scaffolds. In recent years, considerable attention has been directed toward employing ultrasonic energy to generate nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen-containing heterocycles, some of which exhibit notable anticancer activities. This review comprehensively summarizes recent advances in ultrasound-mediated synthetic methodologies, highlighting their ability to accelerate reaction rates, increase yields, and reduce energy consumption, while minimising the use of hazardous solvents and catalysts compared to conventional methods. Ultrasound enables a variety of complex transformations, including multicomponent reactions, annulation and cyclizations, often under ambient temperature or low-energy conditions. The resulting heterocycles demonstrated cytotoxicity against several cancer cell lines in vitro. This review focuses on sonochemical approaches for heterocycle synthesis from 2021 to 2025, as well as the anticancer properties of the compounds generated by these methods.