Cytotoxicity screening of Bangladeshi medicinal plant extracts on pancreatic cancer cells

BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Research Article

Irfan S Ahmad¹  Kenneth L Watkin²  Sherine George³  Erich A Lidstone³  Brian T Cunningham⁴  Siddharth V Bhalerao⁵  Atiya Abbasi⁶ 

[1] Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA;Agricultural and Biological Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA;Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA;Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, Bio-Imaging Science and Technology Group, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA;Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA;Department of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA;Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA;International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences, University of Karachi, Pakistan;

关键词: Curcumin;    Photonic Crystal;    Pancreatic Cancer Cell;    Fibroblast Cell Line;    Untreated Culture;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6882-10-52

 received in 2010-04-08, accepted in 2010-09-17,  发布年份 2010

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThere has been a long standing interest in the identification of medicinal plants and derived natural products for developing cancer therapeutics. Our study focuses upon pancreatic cancer, due to its high mortality rate, that is attributed in part to the lack of an effective chemotherapeutic agent. Previous reports on the use of medicinal plant extracts either alone or alongside conventional anticancer agents in the treatment of this cancer have shown promising results. This work aims to investigate the therapeutic properties of a library of medicinal plants from Bangladesh.Methods56 extracts of 44 unique medicinal plants were studied. The extracts were screened for cytotoxicity against the pancreatic adenocarcinoma cell line Panc-1, using a label-free biosensor assay. The top cytotoxic extracts identified in this screen were tested on two additional pancreatic cancer cell lines (Mia-Paca2 and Capan-1) and a fibroblast cell line (Hs68) using an MTT proliferation assay. Finally, one of the most promising extracts was studied using a caspase-3 colorimetric assay to identify induction of apoptosis.ResultsCrude extracts of Petunia punctata, Alternanthera sessilis, and Amoora chittagonga showed cytotoxicity to three cancer cell lines with IC50 values ranging between 20.3 - 31.4 μg/mL, 13.08 - 34.9 μg/mL, and 42.8 - 49.8 μg/mL, respectively. Furthermore, treatment of Panc-1 cells with Petunia punctata was shown to increase caspase-3 activity, indicating that the observed cytotoxicity was mediated via apoptosis. Only Amoora chittagonga showed low cytotoxicity to fibroblast cells with an IC50 value > 100 μg/mL.ConclusionBased upon the initial screening work reported here, further studies aimed at the identification of active components of these three extracts and the elucidation of their mechanisms as cancer therapeutics are warranted.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© George et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2010. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.