Among the diseases that afflict the human population, cancer is one for which many drug treatments are not yet known or effective. Moreover, the pharmacological treatments used often create serious side effects in sick patients and for this reason, it is essential to find effective and less harmful treatments. To date, marine biodiversity is a real source of metabolites with antitumoral activity and among invertebrates’ ascidians have been the main source to obtain them. Mediterranean area is the richest in biodiversity and contains several ascidian species used in drugs development during the years. However, many more Mediterranean ascidian species have not been studied and could be a source of useful bioactive compounds. This review aims to summarize the scientific studies that analyzed the antitumor compounds obtained from different Mediterranean ascidians species, encouraging them to search further compounds in other new species to improve pharmacological treatments and human population life.

在困扰人类的疾病中，癌症是许多药物治疗尚不为人所知或有效的疾病之一。此外，所使用的药物治疗通常会对病人产生严重的副作用，因此，必须找到有效且危害较小的治疗方法。迄今为止，海洋生物多样性是具有抗肿瘤活性的代谢物的真正来源，而在无脊椎动物的海鞘中，海鞘是获得它们的主要来源。地中海地区是生物多样性最丰富的地区，并包含多年来用于药物开发的几种海鞘物种。然而，还有更多的地中海海鞘物种尚未得到研究，它们可能是有用的生物活性化合物的来源。