Jung Il Lae
Department of Radiation Biology, Environmental Radiation Research Group, Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea.
PLoS One. 2014 Apr 18;9(4):e95492. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095492. eCollection 2014.
Moringa oleifera has been regarded as a food substance since ancient times and has also been used as a treatment for many diseases. Recently, various therapeutic effects of M. oleifera such as antimicrobial, anticancer, anti-inflammatory, antidiabetic, and antioxidant effects have been investigated; however, most of these studies described only simple biological phenomena and their chemical compositions. Due to the increasing attention on natural products, such as those from plants, and the advantages of oral administration of anticancer drugs, soluble extracts from M. oleifera leaves (MOL) have been prepared and their potential as new anticancer drug candidates has been assessed in this study. Here, the soluble cold Distilled Water extract (4°C; concentration, 300 µg/mL) from MOL greatly induced apoptosis, inhibited tumor cell growth, and lowered the level of internal reactive oxygen species (ROS) in human lung cancer cells as well as other several types of cancer cells, suggesting that the treatment of cancer cells with MOL significantly reduced cancer cell proliferation and invasion. Moreover, over 90% of the genes tested were unexpectedly downregulated more than 2-fold, while just below 1% of the genes were upregulated more than 2-fold in MOL extract-treated cells, when compared with nontreated cells. Since severe dose-dependent rRNA degradation was observed, the abnormal downregulation of numerous genes was considered to be attributable to abnormal RNA formation caused by treatment with MOL extracts. Additionally, the MOL extract showed greater cytotoxicity for tumor cells than for normal cells, strongly suggesting that it could potentially be an ideal anticancer therapeutic candidate specific to cancer cells. These results suggest the potential therapeutic implications of the soluble extract from MOL in the treatment of various types of cancers.
辣木自古以来就被视为一种食物，也被用于治疗多种疾病。最近，人们对辣木的各种治疗作用进行了研究，如抗菌、抗癌、抗炎、抗糖尿病和抗氧化作用；然而，这些研究大多只描述了简单的生物学现象及其化学成分。由于对植物等天然产物的关注度不断提高，以及口服抗癌药物的优势，本研究制备了辣木叶的可溶性提取物（MOL），并评估了其作为新型抗癌药物候选物的潜力。在此，MOL的可溶性冷蒸馏水提取物（4°C；浓度为300µg/mL）能极大地诱导人肺癌细胞以及其他几种癌细胞的凋亡，抑制肿瘤细胞生长，并降低细胞内活性氧（ROS）水平，这表明用MOL处理癌细胞可显著降低癌细胞的增殖和侵袭。此外，与未处理的细胞相比，在MOL提取物处理的细胞中，超过90%的测试基因意外地下调了2倍以上，而只有不到1%的基因上调了2倍以上。由于观察到严重的剂量依赖性rRNA降解，大量基因的异常下调被认为是由于MOL提取物处理导致的异常RNA形成。此外，MOL提取物对肿瘤细胞的细胞毒性比对正常细胞更大，这强烈表明它可能是一种理想的针对癌细胞的抗癌治疗候选物。这些结果表明MOL的可溶性提取物在治疗各种类型癌症方面具有潜在的治疗意义。
