The traditional Chinese drug "kusheng", which doctors in China today use as an adjunct to cancer chemotherapy, actually helps the body fight cancer by "turning on" the self-destructive mechanisms in cancer cells, according to an article in Oncotarget.
“Traditional Chinese medicines have been successfully used by healers in China for hundreds and thousands of years. There are many hints that these drugs actually work, but few in what cases do we understand how and why they act on the body. Each component of these drugs has little or no effect on the body, but their combination is effective and has no side effects,”said David Adelson of the University of Adelaide (Australia).
Adelson and his colleagues have revealed the secret of the work of one of these drugs, the drug "kushen", which today doctors in China are actively using to treat inflammation and as one of the additional components during cancer chemotherapy.
This traditional medicine, according to scientists, consists of the juices of two plants - Sophorae flavescens and sarsaparilla (Smilax glabra), which are specially processed and extracted from the roots during the preparation of kushen. According to the current estimates of biochemists, kushen contains about ten biologically active substances with antioxidant, anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties.
The authors of the article tried to find out how they affect the work of cancer cells and how kushen destroys them by adding a large amount of this tincture to a test tube where cells from the breasts of a woman suffering from breast cancer grew.
By comparing the protein content of cells before and after this procedure, biologists found that kushen acts on the same chains of genes and proteins - p53, BCL2 and other regions of the genome, which many types of chemotherapy use to trigger apoptosis - a cellular self-destruction program that usually turns on when fatal damage DNA. True, kushen does not act on those proteins and genes that are influenced by Western drugs, but on other parts of DNA and protein molecules associated with them.
All of this, according to Adelson, confirms that kushen actually works and works in a similar way to modern chemotherapy. This opens the way for the use of this drug in wide medical practice and gives grounds to test the work of other traditional Chinese drugs, which are also attributed to anticancer properties.