Intralesion and Curaderm<sup>BEC5</sup> Topical Combination Therapies of Solasodine Rhamnosyl Glycosides Derived from the Eggplant or Devil’s Apple Result in Rapid Removal of Large Skin Cancers. Methods of Treatment Compared

Abstract

Solasodine rhamnosyl glycosides (SRGs) are chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment of cancer. SRGs in a cream formulation, Curaderm BEC5 , is very effective for the treatment of nonmelanoma skin cancers with excellent cosmetic end results. Intralesion injection of SRGs successfully dispose of very large tumours in animals without any clinical adverse effects. The mode of action of SRGs is by apoptosis. In this study, it is shown that small to large basal cell carcinomas are effectively treated only with topical application of Curaderm BEC5. Here it is reported for the first time that combination of intralesion SRG injection and topical application with Curaderm BEC5 in humans reduces the treatment time period by more than half when compared with topical application as the sole treatment regime. Two intralesion injections of very low doses of SRGs rapidly and effectively remove a large melanoma on a horse. If rapid removal of large troublesome skin cancers is required then this can be achieved by intralesion and topical treatments. Intralesion or combination therapy with SRGs may have some applications for melanomas in situ such as lentigo maligna.

Drug therapy: Solamargine and other solasodine rhamnosyl glycosides as anticancer agents

“…Further clinical studies showed that Curaderm BEC5 eliminated basal cell carcinoma in areas that were difficult to treat by any modality [46]. Very large basal cell carcinomas were shown to be successfully treatable with Curaderm BEC5 [40,47].…”

Solasodine Glycosides: A Topical Therapy for Actinic Keratosis. A Single-Blind, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled, Parallel Group Study with Curaderm<sup>BEC5</sup>

“…The glycoalkaloids solamargine and solasonine singly or in combination are known to be good antineoplastic biological therapeutic agents . These chemical compounds occur in plants of the Solanaceae family such as S. linnaeanum (devil's apple) and S. melongena (egg-plant) [37,38].…”

“…The solasodine glycosides enhance the intrinsic ratio of Bax to Bcl-2 by up-regulating Bax and down-regulating Bcl-2 and Bcl-xL expressions. These effects result in activation of Caspase −8, −9 and −3 in cancer cells, indicating that extrinsic and intrinsic apoptotic pathways in cancer cells [8,22,23,[27][28][29][30][31]38,39] are triggered by the solasodine glycosides.…”

“…Cream formulations containing the BEC solasodine glycosides are effective topical treatments for human malignant skin cancers [4,[20][21][22]29,[32][33][34][35][36]. Phases I and II clinical trials have established safety and efficacy of various forms of topical formulations [4,20,29,[32][33][34][35][36]38,39]. Subsequently with Phase III clinical studies it was shown that very low concentrations of BEC were required to eliminate the malignant skin cancers basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas [4,20,21,29,32,[34][35][36]38].…”

“…Phases I and II clinical trials have established safety and efficacy of various forms of topical formulations [4,20,29,[32][33][34][35][36]38,39]. Subsequently with Phase III clinical studies it was shown that very low concentrations of BEC were required to eliminate the malignant skin cancers basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas [4,20,21,29,32,[34][35][36]38]. The concentrations of BEC to treat the malignant lesions were similar to the effective concentrations of BEC with a wide variety of tumour cells in cell culture studies [5,6,[8][9][10][11][12][13]16,17,[19][20][21]23,[27][28][29][30][31][32][34][35][36].…”