Screening of Selected Ethno-Medicinal Plants for Anti-Cancer Activity

Abstract

Cancer is an epidemic worldwide. As per the report of the National Centre for Health Statistics in 2019, approximately 606,880 patients were died due to cancer and 1,762,450 new cases were detected. To overcome this scenario, worldwide research is going on to combat this disease. Among these, treatment of cancer through plant phytochemical has attended much prominence in the last few decades. Phytochemicals are produced by plants for their defense mechanism. However, these can also be used to treat many deadly diseases, among them cancer is most common. In the present study, we selected three Ethno-medicinal plants namely Careya arborea (leaf), Ficus religiosa (leaf) and Amorphophallus campanulatus (tuber) to evaluate their efficacy against A549 human lung cancer cells. MTT assay is widely used to assess cell viability. Human lung adenocarcinoma cell lines were purchased from NCCS, Pune and maintained in the laboratory under all standard conditions. Cells were grown, using ready to use media containing 4.5 grams of glucose, L-glutamine and sodium pyruvate. Growth factors were made available to the cells through the fetal bovine serum. We treated the cells with different concentrations of methanol and distilled water extracts of the selected plants and investigate the cell viability using a statistical test. We found varied significant differences between control cells and the cells treated with plant extracts.