麻豆传媒

Biomedical scientists at (TTUHSC El Paso) tested nimbolide, a compound found in neem leaves, against pancreatic cancer in cell lines and mice. The results revealed that nimbolide can stop pancreatic cancer鈥檚 growth and metastasis without harming normal, healthy cells.

鈥淭he promise nimbolide has shown is amazing, and the specificity of the treatment towards cancer cells over normal cells is very intriguing,鈥� says Rajkumar Lakshmanaswamy, Ph.D., an associate professor in TTUHSC El Paso鈥檚 .

Pancreatic cancer has the highest mortality rate of all cancers with 94% of patients dying within five years of diagnosis. The cancer grows quickly and there are currently no effective treatments available, underscoring the importance of finding new therapies.

In the study, Lakshmanaswamy and his lab observed that nimbolide was able to reduce the migration and invasion capabilities of pancreatic cancer cells by 70 percent; meaning the cancerous cells did not become aggressive and spread. And that鈥檚 promising, the researchers say. In humans, this migration and invasion 鈥� or metastasis 鈥� of pancreatic cancer to other regions of the body is the chief cause of mortality.

Nimbolide treatments also induced cancer cell death, causing the size and number of pancreatic cancer cell colonies to drop by 80 percent. 鈥淣imbolide seems to attack pancreatic cancer from all angles,鈥� Lakshmanaswamy says.

The TTUHSC El Paso researchers stress that one of the most important findings is that nimbolide did not harm healthy cells in both the in vitro and in vivo experiments.

Lead author and postdoctoral researcher Ramadevi Subramani, Ph.D., explains, 鈥淢any people in India actually eat neem and it doesn鈥檛 have harmful side effects, which suggests that using nimbolide for pancreatic cancer will not cause adverse effects like chemotherapy and radiation typically do.鈥�

While the results are promising, Lakshmanaswamy says there鈥檚 still a long way to go before nimbolide can be used to treat pancreatic cancer in humans. The TTUHSC El Paso team plans to continue researching the anticancer mechanisms behind the plant extract. They鈥檒l also study various ways to administer nimbolide to maintain its potency against pancreatic cancer.

Additional TTUHSC El Paso collaborators who participated in the study were postdoctoral researchers Arunkumar Arumugam, Ph.D., Sushmita Nandy, Ph.D., and graduate students Fernando Camacho, Elizabeth Gonzalez, and Joshua Medel.