Nanocurcuma against cancer
Biologists have turned turmeric into cancer-killing Nanoparticles
Ordinary turmeric can be used to create nanoparticles that cause mass death of cancer cells in the brain and other parts of the body, scientists say in an article published in the journal Nanoscale (Kalashnikova et al., Nanoparticle delivery of curcumin induces cellular hypoxia and ROS-mediated apoptosis via modulation of Bcl-2/Bax in human neuroblastoma).
"Neuroblastoma often does not respond to conventional chemotherapy, and therefore its carriers rarely survive. We have discovered a new way to fight this tumor, which at the same time is not toxic and does not negatively affect the patient's health. We hope that such nanoparticles will help us in the future to create personalized cancer treatment methods," says Tamara Westmoreland from the University of Central Florida in Orlando (in a UCF press release, Nemours Collaborate to Defeat Difficult-to-Treat Childhood Cancer – VM).
Various forms of brain and spinal cord cancers are relatively rare compared to breast, prostate or intestinal cancers, but this is compensated by their aggressiveness and danger to humans. Such cancer in most cases leads to the rapid death of the patient due to difficulties in the use of chemotherapy or the impossibility of surgical intervention.
Brain cancer most often affects children, not adults. Only one of several subspecies of these tumors, glioblastoma, is the cause of 15% of cancer deaths among infants. Until now, there were no means that could prevent the development of these tumors and at the same time not cause mass death of healthy brain cells. Relatively recently, scientists have discovered that meadowsweet and some other plants contain substances that can suppress this cancer.
As Westmoreland and her colleagues tell us, similar molecules are found in turmeric, a common spice made from the ground rhizomes of the Curcuma longa plant. The problem was that they could not be dissolved in water. This prevented their use to fight cancer, since they cannot be delivered to the tumor and evenly distributed over it.
The authors of the article found a way to solve this problem by attaching curcumin molecules to the surface of cerium oxide nanoparticles capable of penetrating into cancer cells. These nanoparticles play a dual role – they not only deliver curcumin inside the cancer tumor, but also generate a large number of aggressive molecules inside its cell, damaging DNA and helping the herbal medicine fight cancer.
Scientists introduced two versions of such nanoparticles into the cultures of brain cancer cells, some of which were extremely aggressive and resistant to radiotherapy, and others were less dangerous types of cancer.
Experiments have shown that all versions of nanoparticles with the addition of curcumin accelerated the death of cancer cells and inhibited tumor growth. Curcumin particles, according to scientists, worked especially well on those subtypes of neuroblastoma against which chemotherapy and radiotherapy do not work, killing about half of the cells in a few hours and accelerating their death by 170%.
The most important thing is that they did not damage healthy cells, since both curcumin and nanoparticles are activated only inside cancer cells with their disturbed acid-base balance. Now scientists are working on creating new versions of these nanoparticles and assessing their safety for animals and humans.
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26.07.2017