Screening the herbal pharmacy

Popular release date: 4-Mar-2008 E-mail Article Contact: Dr. Sibylle Kohlstädt s.kohlstaedt dkfz.de 49-622-142-2843 Helmholtz Association of German Research Heart Screening the herbal pharmacy Curing cancer with natural products - a case championing shamans and herb women?

Not at all, for many chemotherapies to battle cancer applied in modern medicine are natural products or were developed on the basis of general substances.

Thus, taxanes used in prostate and bosom cancer conduct towards are imaginary from yew trees. The popular periwinkle plant, which grows along the ground of many front yards, is the source of vinca alkaloids that are effective, for example, against malignant lymphomas.

The modern anti-cancer medicine topotecan and irinotecan are derived from a constituent of the Chinese Jovial Tree. Looking for new compounds, doctors and scientists are increasingly focusing on substances from plants cast-off in traditional medicine.

About three quarters of the natural pharmaceutical compounds commonly used today are derived from plants of the habitual medicament of the people in various parts of the world.

The chances of find new substances with interesting working profiles in traditional curative plants are more suitable than in common-or-garden botany. In his search for full ingredients, Professor Dr.

Working well-balanced with colleagues in Mainz and Düsseldorf, Germany, Graz, Austria and Kunming in China, he launched a systematic put together explore in 76 Chinese medicinal plants that are believed to be effective against malignant tumors and other growths.

First end result of this read have straightaway been published. Draws from 18 of the plants under investigation were found to substantially cut off the growth of a cancer cell line in the urbanity dish.

The scientists proceeded to chemically separate, step by step, all active extracts, tracing the active component after everyone separation step next to cubicle tests.

The chemical structure of the concoct is analysed using atomic magnetic resonance and mass spectroscopy. We are combining natural matter test with advanced analytical and molecular-biological methods", Efferth explains.

Tree constituents that seem particularly positive are at the moment subjected to further tests."

Such constituents include, representing example, substances derived from the Rangoon Creeper, an decorative plant with claret flowers, or from Red-Root Sage. The latter contains three constituent with controlling anti-tumor activity.

The substances were constitute to terminate the growth of a particular tumor cell line that is particularly unsubmissive to many commonly used cytotoxins due to overproduction of a transport protein in the cell wall.

In contrast, a complete range of standard anti-cancer drugs fail to be effective against this cell. We can expect to find many interesting, yet unknown working mechanisms among the chemically highly diverse natural substances.

Currently, we are aligning the effectiveness of the substances on 60 different cancer cell cover with the gene activity profiles of these cells. Thus, we can end the exact gene products that are the cellular object of our compounds.

From http://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/haog-sth030408.php