Abstract:
Cancer is the second cause of death in the world and is foreseen to be responsible for about 16 million deaths in 2040. Approximately, 60% of the drugs used to treat cancer are of natural origin. Besides the extensive use of some of these drugs in therapies, such as those derived from the genus Taxus, a significant number of plants have revealed themselves as useful against cancer in recent years. The field of ethnobotany focuses on documenting traditional knowledge associated with plants, constituting a starting point to uncover the potential of new plant-based drugs to treat or prevent, in this case, tumour diseases and side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. From a series of extensive ethnobotanical prospections across the Catalan linguistic area (CLA), we have recorded uses for 41 taxa with antitumour effects. The two most quoted botanical families are Asteraceae and Ranunculaceae, and the most frequently reported species is Ranunculus parnassifolius, a high-mountain species, which is widely collected for this purpose. The reported species have been used to treat an important number of cancer types, focusing on preventive, palliative, and curative uses, as well as to deal with the side effects of conventional treatments. Comparing our results in CLA with previous data available in the most comprehensive databases of pharmacology and a review of cytotoxicity assays revealed that for the several species reported here, there was no previous evidence of traditional uses against cancer. Despite the need for further analyses to experimentally validate the information presented here, combining traditional uses and phylogenetically-informed strategies to phytochemical and pharmacological research would represent new avenues to establish more integrative approaches, hence improving the ability to select new candidate taxa in cancer research.
摘要:
癌症是世界上第二大死亡原因,预计到2040年将导致约1600万人死亡。大约,用于治疗癌症的药物中有60%是天然来源的。除了这些药物在治疗中的广泛使用之外,比如来自紫杉属的,近年来,相当多的植物已经表明自己对癌症有用。民族植物学领域专注于记录与植物相关的传统知识,构成揭示新的植物性药物治疗或预防潜力的起点,在这种情况下,肿瘤疾病和化疗和放疗的副作用。从加泰罗尼亚语言区(CLA)的一系列广泛的民族植物学展望中,我们已经记录了41种具有抗肿瘤作用的分类群的用途。引用最多的两个植物科是菊科和毛茸科,最常报道的物种是毛藻,一个高山物种,为此目的广泛收集。报道的物种已用于治疗重要的癌症类型,注重预防,姑息治疗,和治疗用途,以及处理常规治疗的副作用。将我们在CLA中的结果与最全面的药理学数据库中可用的先前数据进行比较,并对细胞毒性测定进行了综述,结果表明,对于此处报道的几种物种,以前没有传统用途抗癌的证据。尽管需要进一步分析以实验验证此处提供的信息,将传统用途和系统发育知情策略结合到植物化学和药理学研究中,将代表建立更综合的方法的新途径,从而提高了在癌症研究中选择新的候选分类群的能力。