Salvianolic Acids: Potential Source of Natural Drugs for the Treatment of Fibrosis Disease and Cancer

Abstract

Salvianolic acids, the most effective and abundant compounds extracted from Salvia miltiorrhiza (Danshen), are well known for its good anti-oxidative activity. Danshen has been extensively used as a traditional medicine to treat cardiovascular-related diseases in China and other Asian countries for hundreds of years. Recently, more and more studies have demonstrated that salvianolic acids also have a good effect on the alleviation of fibrosis disease and the treatment of cancer. In vivo and in vitro experiments have demonstrated that salvianolic acids can modulate signal transduction within fibroblasts and cancer cells. It is discovered that the cancer treatment of salvianolic acids is not only because salvianolic acids promote the apoptosis of cancer cells, but also due to the inhibition of cancer-associated epithelial-mesenchymal transition processes. In this article, we review a variety of studies focusing on the comprehensive roles of salvianolic acids in the treatment of fibrosis disease and cancer. These perspectives on the therapeutic potential of salvianolic acids highlight the importance of these compounds, which could be the novel and attractive drugs for fibrosis disease and cancer.

Unraveling Plant Natural Chemical Diversity for Drug Discovery Purposes

“…Nevertheless, cellular phenotypic changes are extremely complex to understand, and this approach has been more than once extremely frustrating despite some successes, outside of the NP recognition area (Nosjean et al, 2000;Graves et al, 2002). Actually, another limitation of this approach is linked with working with complex mixtures in NP discovery as sometimes several compounds could contribute synergistically to the global action on a disease: like for example the compounds (at least three of them) derived from leaves of Salvia miltiorrhiza (red sage) that are reported to act at many different levels of liver fibrosis (Ma et al, 2019). This kind of observation would strongly argue against the strategy described in here aiming at the discovery of the main pure drug-like compound in a plant extract.…”

Salvianolic Acid D Alleviates Cerebral Ischemia-Reperfusion Injury by Suppressing the Cytoplasmic Translocation and Release of HMGB1-Triggered NF-κB Activation to Inhibit Inflammatory Response

“…As reported by chemistry research, effective compounds of Danshen are mainly summarized into two categories: lipophilic diterpenoids and watersoluble phenolic acids. The phenolic acids have been identified as natural cardiovascular and cerebrovascular protectants with a variety of pharmacological functions, such as anti-inflammation, antiplatelet aggregation, and antioxidation [36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. These phenolic acids have been accounted for most of the biological activities of Danshen, especially the beneficial impact on ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) damage [43].…”

Targeting Hepatic Stellate Cells for the Treatment of Liver Fibrosis by Natural Products: Is It the Dawning of a New Era?

“…Until now there are more than 10 different types of SAs identified, which are coded as salvianolic acid A, B, C, D, etc. (Ma et al, 2019). Salvianolic acid A (SAA) and salvianolic acid B (SAB) are the most abundant ones in the extract.…”