Russian scientists have effectively “attacked” cancer cells: the results of a new treatment method have been announced

Thai herbal mixture was tested

An international group of scientists, which included Russians from MISIS, tested in the laboratory a traditional Thai herb, which, according to legend, cures liver cancer. According to experts, they have proven that the Thai herbal collection Benja Ummarit kills cancer cells in a new way, literally clogging them with excess iron. The scientific work was recently published in Journal of Ethnopharmacology.

This method, the authors of the article believe, can prolong the life of patients after long courses of treatment with chemicals.

The main reason for the decrease in the effectiveness of treatment, as a rule, is the addiction of tumor cells to the “chemistry”, and scientists are looking for ways to “deceive” these cells, stop or significantly slow down their development. As reported at the time at the Oncology Center named after. Blokhin, the cause of relapse can be tumor stem cells that survived treatment - a very small group of slowly dividing cells with increased resistance to the effects of drugs.

A similar effect, for example, is observed in the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common type of liver cancer, which affects about 600 thousand people in the world every year. At an advanced stage, patients are usually prescribed one of the most widely used drugs, but it increases overall survival by no more than three months. The reason for such a short time is the very resistance of cancer cells to traditional methods of fighting them.

Scientists around the world are looking for new ways to prolong the lives of patients. One of them is considered to be the mechanism of ferroptosis, discovered in 2012. This is one of the scenarios for the death of a cancer cell, in which the main role is played not just by the oxidative process, or by stopping tumor growth, but by the excessive accumulation of free iron molecules by the cell. Associated with this is a more active process of producing active oxygen, which destroys the cancer cell. It becomes unable to “digest” large amounts of iron and oxygen.

It is known that it is tumor cells that exhibit a special “greed” for iron, and therefore scientists have suggested that cancer cells that are resistant to traditional means will “fall” precisely due to ferroptosis. Researchers have begun searching for natural compounds that trigger this process.

Several years ago, they drew attention to the traditional Thai herbal mixture Benja Ummarit, which healers used to treat liver cancer.

Its formula was written down in Thai traditional medical scripture, published in 1907 at the royal initiative of King Chulalongkorn, King Rama V of Thailand. It consisted of nine medicinal substances, namely: aloe, asafoetida (the juice secreted from the rhizome of Ferula stinking), black pepper, gummigut (a type of gum that flows from tree wounds), ginger, kaffir lime, Javan long pepper, red physalis and Epsom salts (or magnesium sulfate).

In Thailand, at the universities of Srinakharinwirot and Mahidol, it was suggested that this collection may be suitable for the role of an activator of ferroptosis.

And at NUST MISIS they proved this using a unique scanning ion-conducting microscope with a confocal module. Scientists added nanoparticles of a drug made from a Thai herbal collection to the tumor cells of rats. As a result, using light microscopy and transmission electron microscopy, morphological signs similar to ferroptosis were shown: cell swelling, swelling of the mitochondria of diseased cells from excessive accumulation of iron in them, and subsequent cell death.

Scientists suggest that the new treatment method, when it passes all stages of testing, will be able to significantly extend the lives of patients in the future.