Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and from the University of Utah at Salt Lake City have recently used an ingenious process to enable curcumin, an active ingredient in turmeric, to kill cancer cells. Turmeric has been a household ingredient in India for the longest time. In fact, Indians have always exploited its medicinal properties too, however, this research could potentially be path-breaking.
Curcumin is also known to exhibit anti-cancer properties, but its poor solubility in water had impeded curcumin’s clinical application in cancer. A drug needs to be soluble in water as otherwise it will not flow through the bloodstream. Now we hear that despite its poor abilities to reach the cancerous cells, the research has found a way to reach curcumin to the affected cells in the body. A team headed by Dipanjan Pan, associate professor of bioengineering at UIUC, has now found a way out. “Curcumin’s medicinal benefit can be fully appreciated if its solubility issue is resolved,” Pan told this correspondent in an e-mail. “It is a combination of clever chemistry and nano-precipitation utilising host guest chemistry,” Pan explained. “The sophisticated chemistry leads to self-assembled hierarchical structure that drives the solubility of curcumin and simultaneously delivers an additional anticancer agent, i.e. platinum. The combined therapeutic effect — of curcumin and platinum — is lethal for the cancer cells,” Pan continued.
According to their report, the metallocyclic complex created using platinum “not only enabled curcumin’s solubility, but proved to be 100 times more effective in treating various cancer types such as melanoma and breast cancer cells than using curcumin and platinum agents separately”. “Our results demonstrate that curcumin works completely in sync with platinum and exerts synergistic effect to show remarkable anticancer properties,” says the report. “The platinum-curcumin combination kills the cells by fragmenting its DNA,” the report adds.
“Extensive animal studies are in progress in my laboratory, including in rodents and pigs,” Pan said. This research further wants to prove that this method will help kill cancer stem cells — the birth place of cancer cells — thereby preventing the recurrence of cancer.
