Tag Archives: Fabio Marra

Iran’s work on turmeric (curcumin) as an anti-cancer drug

It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned either Iran or curcumin (a constituent of turmeric) but an April 15, 2014 news item on Nanowerk has given me an opportunity to do both,

Nanotechnology researchers from Tarbiat Modarres University [Iran] produced a new drug capable of detecting and removing cancer cells using turmeric …

The compound is made of curcumin found in the extract of turmeric, and has desirable physical and chemical stability and prevents the proliferation of cancer cells.

An April 16, 2014 Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council (INIC) news release, which despite its date appears to have originated the news item, fills in details about the research,

In this drug, curcumin with high efficiency (approximately 87%) was loaded in the polymeric nanocarrier, and it created a spherical structure with the size of 140 nm. The drug has high physical and chemical stability. The drug was used successfully in laboratory conditions in the treatment of a type of aggressive tumor in the central nervous system, called glioblastoma (GBM).

The interesting point is that the fatal effect of nanocurcumin on mature stem cells derived from marrow and natural cells of skin fibroblast is observed at a concentration higher than a concentration that is effective on cancer cells. In other words, no fatal effect on natural cells is observed at concentrations that are fatal to cancer cells. It shows that curcumin prefers to enter cancer cells.

The size range of the nanocarrier used in this research is 15-100 nm. Physical and chemical stability, non-toxicity, and biodegradability are among the main characteristics of the nanocarriers. Based on the results, the nanocarrier used in this research has no toxic effect on cells. In other words, all the death in the cells is caused by curcumin, and dendrosome only results in bioavailability and transference of the drug into the cells.

“The drug has the potential to affect a number of message delivery paths in the cells, one of which is cell proliferation path. Therefore, the drug prefers to enter cancer cells rather than various types of natural cells,” the researchers said.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Dendrosomal curcumin nanoformulation downregulates pluripotency genes via miR-145 activation in U87MG glioblastoma cells by Maryam Tahmasebi Mirgani, Benedetta Isacchi, Majid Sadeghizadeh, Fabio Marra, Anna Rita Bilia, Seyed Javad Mowla, Farhood Najafi, & Esmael Babaei. International Journal of Nanomedicine, vol. 9, issue 1, January 2014, pp. 403-417.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2147/IJN.S48136

This is an open access paper.

I last wrote about turmeric or more specifically curcumin in a December 25, 2011 posting about research at UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles).