LUNG CANCER
The conventional treatments of cancer like chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation have failed to eradicate lung cancer completely. In a report by World Health Organisation (WHO), dated 12 September 2018, it was observed that 1.8 million deaths happened due to Lung cancer that year which is the largest number as compared to other cancers! Henceforth it won’t be wrong to say that lung cancer is the deadliest cancer. In the pursuit to fight cancer, researchers have discovered Tocotrienol which is supposed to exhibit anti-cancer activities. Several studies have been conducted over Annatto based Tocotrienol (DeltaGold-Eannatto). One such study, ‘Delta-Tocotrienol inhibits non-small lung cancer cell invasion via the inhibition of NF-kb, uPA activator, and MMP-9’, was conducted where it was observed that Delta-Tocotrienol attenuated tumor invasion and metastasis by the repression of MMP-9/uPA via downregulation of Notch-1 and NF-kB pathways and upregulation of miR-451. The data also suggested that Delta-Tocotrienol may have potential therapeutic benefit against NSCLC metastasis.
Why Tocotrienol?
Antioxidants
Antioxidants,especially Tocotrienol was observed to exhibit anti-cancer activity against lung cancer cells.
Angiogenesis
Angiogenesis which is the process of formation of blood vessels in cancer cells like in your brain cancer. Tocotrienol promotes cancer cell death to a very great extent and good results of anti-angiogenesis property of Tocotrienols have been observed against lung cancer cells in the study.
Apoptosis
Apoptosis or programmed cell death is the process of elimination and death of cancer cells. All isoforms of Tocotrienols have been observed to induce apoptosis in lung cancer cells through the activation of caspase-8 and mitochondrial cyt.c release. Tocotrienol was also reported to induce apoptosis in human lung adenocarcinoma that harbors Ras mutation.
Cell Proliferation
Cell Proliferation is the process by which cancer cells copy their DNA and multiply into more cancer cells and thus leading to the spreading of cancer. Delta Tocotrienol has been observed to possess maximum anti-proliferative characteristics against HCC cells by upregulating peroxiredoxin-4. Although other isoforms of Tocotrienol also were observed to have commendable anti-proliferative characteristics.
Cell Proliferation
Cell Proliferation is the process by which cancer cells copy their DNA and divide into two cancer cells during mitosis and rapidly multiply into more cancer cells. It was observed that Delta-Tocotrienol inhibited lung cancer cell proliferation, induce cancer cell death and prevented cell cancer invasion.
Chemopreventionand
Chemopreventionand anti-cancer activity against lung cancer have been observed in Tocotrienols. Delta-Tocotrienol was observed to exert anti-cancer activity in lung cancer by elevating microRNA, miR-34a, that led to the downregulation of Notch-1 and its downstream targets such as Bcl-2, cyclin D1, and survivin. Moreover, it was also observed that a redox-silent analogue of Alpha-Tocotrienol, 6-O-carboxypropyl-alpha-tocotrienol was found to possess higher anti-cancer potential than Tocotrienol in A549 lung cancer cells.
Hypoxia adaptation
Hypoxia adaptation of lung cancer cells was observed to be suppressed by Tocotrienol through the inhibition of Src-induced Akt activation and decreased HIF-2 alpha.