Chemical found in coral shows skin cancer treatment power
The Tampa Tribune
Published: May 27, 2009
After discovering that a chemical derived from a type of coral founded in the Middle East appears to have the power to prevent skin cancer, researchers decided to test whether it could do double duty as a cancer treatment.
According to an article in the March issue of the journal Translational Oncology, it appears the answer may be yes.
The substance the researchers have been investigating, sarcophine-diol, is derived from sarcophine, which comes from a soft coral that lives in the Red Sea, the body of water between Africa and Saudi Arabia.
The laboratory of Chandradhar Dwivedi, head of the SDSU Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, is overseeing the research. Other scientists from the United States and Egypt have been studying the role of sarcophine-diol as a possible skin cancer preventative and treatment. SDSU graduate student Xiaoying Zhang has been directing the research.
“We are finding that sarcophine-diol could be used both for chemoprevention and as a chemotherapeutic agent,” Dwivedi says.
The researchers believe sarcophine-diol can kill skin cancers by inducing a type of programmed cell death scientists call apoptosis. Cancer cells can wildly grow and proliferate because genetic malfunctions spare them from apoptosis.
Sarcophine-diol apparently induces apoptosis in skin cancer cells by prompting the cells to produce “executioner” proteins, which play a role in apoptosis. It took relatively high levels of sarcophine-diol to spur executioner protein production.
Even at this potentially therapeutic level, however, sarcophine-diol did not boost executioner protein production in normal skin cells. Although it did have some impact on the viability of healthy cells, sarcophine-diol appears to be much more toxic to cancer cells than noncancerous ones, the researchers say.
This suggests sarcophine-diol could one day be used to kill skin cancer cells with causing collateral damage to health cells, often an unwanted side effective in many forms of chemotherapy.
