Question: How do you find anticancer properties in rain-forest plants?

Jessica Chu answered on 16 Jun 2011:

The National Cancer Institute have done a big big screening programme back in the late 1950s. They collected 35,000 plants from the rainforest. As you can imagine testing 35,000 against a panel of cancer cell lines will take a long time! because once a good plant is identified – they will investigate further but sometimes they might give false positive results so it is back to square 1.

But in 1960s they have found a really good tree – Pacific Yew Tree! And that is what gives us Taxol – for ovarian and lung cancer treatments.

They would do a lot of robust testing like using MTT assay or now the SRB assay – to measure the if the cancer cells are still alive or is have stopped growing after being given the plant extracts. If there’s good results – cancer cells are dying or have stopped growing then further tests will be done. Other tests include finding out how it works (so we know which cancer it might be suitable for) by looking at the cancer cell cycle (what are the differences after receiving the plant extracts) etc. or if the plant extracts induce a specific cell death mechanism?

At the same time – chemists will try and isolate the active chemical – this can take ages!!!!
Then once, if we are lucky to get one single active chemical like taxol, then we can try and formulate that into a drug.

So it is a very lengthy process!

Hope this helps!