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CHICAGO, IL- A team of Indian American researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the University of Utah at Salt Lake City has developed a process to enable curcumin to help kill cancer cells.
Curcumin is the active ingredient of turmeric, a medicinal herb with powerful anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties
Curcumin is also known to exhibit anti-cancer properties, but its poor solubility in water had impeded curcumin’s clinical application in cancer. A drug needs to be soluble in water in order to flow through the bloodstream.
Despite decades of research, the development of effectively delivering water-insoluble curcumin to cancer cells had remained a challenge.
A team lead by Dipanjan Pan, associate professor of bioengineering at UIUC, has now found a way out.
Pan’s laboratory collaborated with Peter Stang at the University of Utah to come up with a solution to render curcumin soluble, and deliver it to infected tumors to kill the cancer cells.
The team has reported its work in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
Pan’s team included post-doctoral researcher Santosh Misra at UIUC; and Sougata Datta, Manik Lal Saha, Nabajit Lahiri, Janis Louie, and Peter J. Stang from the University of Utah.