Screening the herbal pharmacy

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Public release date: 4-Mar-2008

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

Contact: Dr. Sibylle Kohlstädt

s.kohlstaedt@...

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Helmholtz Association of German Research Centre

Screening the herbal pharmacy

Curing cancer with natural products – a case for shamans and herb women?

Not at all, for many chemotherapies to fight cancer applied in modern

medicine are natural products or were developed on the basis of natural

substances. Thus, taxanes used in prostate and breast cancer treatment

are made 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 drugs topotecan and irinotecan are derived from a

constituent of the Chinese Happy Tree.

Looking for new compounds, doctors and scientists are increasingly

focusing on substances from plants used in traditional medicine. About

three quarters of the natural pharmaceutical compounds commonly used

today are derived from plants of the traditional medicine of the people

in various parts of the world. The chances of finding new substances

with interesting working profiles in traditional medicinal plants are

better than in common-or-garden botany.

In his search for active ingredients, Professor Dr. Efferth of

the DKFZ has been concentrating on herbal remedies from traditional

Chinese medicine with particularly well documented application range.

Working together with colleagues in Mainz and Düsseldorf, Germany, Graz,

Austria and Kunming in China, he launched a systematic compound search

in 76 Chinese medicinal plants that are believed to be effective against

malignant tumors and other growths. First results of this study have now

been published.

Extracts from 18 of the plants under investigation were found to

substantially suppress the growth of a cancer cell line in the culture

dish. “With this success rate of about 24 percent, we are way above the

results that could be expected from searching through large chemical

substance libraries,” Efferth explains.

The scientists proceeded to chemically separate, step by step, all

active extracts, tracing the active component after each separation step

by cell tests. The chemical structure of the compounds is analyzed using

nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectroscopy. “We are combining

natural substance research with advanced analytical and

molecular-biological methods”, Efferth explains. “Plant constituents

that seem particularly promising are immediately subjected to further

tests.” Such constituents include, for example, substances derived from

the Rangoon Creeper, an ornamental plant with red flowers, or from

Red-Root Sage. The latter contains three ingredients with powerful

anti-tumor activity. The substances were found to suppress the growth of

a specific tumor cell line that is particularly resistant to many

commonly used cytotoxins due to overproduction of a transport protein in

the cell wall. In contrast, a whole 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 lines with the gene activity profiles of these cells. Thus, we can

determine the exact gene products that are the cellular targets of our

compounds. Thereby, it may be possible to discover whole new Achilles’

heels of the cancer cell,” said Efferth describing the next steps.

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Efferth, Stefan Kahl, Kerstin us, , Rolf Rauh,

Herbert Boechzelt, Xiaojiang Hao, Bernd Kaina and Rudolf Bauer:

Phytochemistry and Pharmacogenomics of Natural products derived from

traditional Chinese medica with activity against tumor cells. Molecular

Cancer Therapy 7 (1) 2008, page 152

The task of the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum in Heidelberg (German

Cancer Research Center, DKFZ) is to systematically investigate the

mechanisms of cancer development and to identify cancer risk factors.

The results of this basic research are expected to lead to new

approaches in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The

Center is financed to 90 percent by the Federal Ministry of Education

and Research and to 10 percent by the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg. It is

a member of the Helmholtz Association of National Research Centers

(Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Deutscher Forschungszentren e.V.).

--

ne Holden, MS, RD

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