Vibrant green leaves sprout from tall fragrant plants sitting neatly in two rows of terracotta pots in Valerie Sponsel's UTSA biology laboratory. One floor just above her is the chemistry lab of Francis Yoshimoto, who is extracting the plant's leaves for medicinal compounds. Soon, the researchers will meet with UTSA researcher Annie Lin, who will test the extracted compounds on cancer cells.
The plant is Artemisia annua, or Sweet Annie, and it contains medicinal compounds. UTSA researchers are studying the plant to understand the bioactive properties of one of these compounds, Arteannuin B, in cancer cells and COVID, the disease caused by the virus, SARS-CoV-2.are derived from natural products. They're made by plants, fungi or bacteria. Half of these drugs originated in plants.
Sweet Annie has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for over 2,000 years. The plant produces artemisinin, which contains an endoperoxide, used for the treatment of malaria. Its leaf extracts have been used to treat a variety of other diseases, including cancer and COVID-19. Coffee infused with Sweet Annie is the focus of a current cancer-related clinical trial while the plant extract infused in tea has been used in Africa to potentially combat COVID.
"We're in the first phases of studying the mechanism of action of Sweet Annie's medicinal compounds to decide how to best deliver them and target therapy," said Lin, an associate professor in the UTSA Department of Integrative Biology and the Department of Neurosciences, Developmental and Regenerative Biology."We can be more specific. We can lower the concentration to directly target tumors.
"We used methanol as the solvent to extract the compound, and that's where I got the idea that this must be how it works inKaitlyn Varela, a doctoral student in Yoshimoto's lab, fractionated and characterized the Sweet Annie leaf extracts by using NMR spectroscopy and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.
The researchers tested the fractions for cytotoxic activity against glioblastoma cells, a malignant form of brain tumor. Then they purified the fractions to identify and test their individual components against cancer cells one-by-one. Throughout the process, arteannuin B consistently demonstrated cytotoxic activity against GBM
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