Cytotoxicity screening of Bangladeshi medicinal plant extracts on pancreatic cancer cells

Abstract

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.

Anticancer potential of aqueous extract of alocasia macrorrhiza against hepatic cancer in vitro and in vivo

“…Results are mean values ± SD of independent experiments performed in triplicate. natural products (Desai et al, 2008;Sigstedt et al, 2008;George et al, 2010;Dai et al, 2011;Shynu et al, 2011).…”

“…Natural products are a rich resource of cancer chemotherapy drugs, and primarily target rapidly cycling tumor cells, experimental studies demonstrated that many naturally occurring agents and plant extracts have anticancer potential in a variety of bioassay systems and animal models, having relevance to human diseases (Aziz et al, 2003), thus the longstanding interest in the identification of medicinal plants and derived natural products for developing cancer therapeutics increased steadily (Yu et al, 2001;George et al, 2010;Dai et al, 2011).…”

Comparison of effectiveness in antitumor activity between flavonoids and polyphenols of the methanolic extract of roots of Potentilla fulgens in breast cancer cells

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<i>In vitro</i> anticancer activity and cytotoxicity of some papaver alkaloids on cancer and normal cell lines

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