A compound found in extra virgin olive oil might be the next best hope in the fight against cancer. Oleocanthal, which already is associated with a number of beneficial health effects, has unprecedented success killing human cancer cells when exposed to them in a lab, according to a recent study published in Molecular & Cellular Oncology. The best part? The compound leaves healthy cells unharmed.
The study, performed by scientists at Rutgers University and Hunter College, built on previous work that had suggested oleocanthal had lethal effects on cancer. What researchers didn’t know was why. They hypothesized that the compound triggered a self-defense sequence in cancer cells, but what they found was even more interesting.
In fact, the oleocanthal compromises the cell barrier where cancer cells partition off their waste products. Think about the colon rupturing in a human and its contents escaping into the rest of the body, and you get the idea. “Once you open one of those things, all hell breaks loose,” Paul Breslin, professor of nutritional sciences at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers, said in a press release.
The oleocanthal works quickly, too. “Amazingly, OC induced cell death in all cancer cells examined — as rapidly as 30 minutes after treatment,” the study reports.
The next task is to figure out why the oleocanthal killed cancer cells but merely put healthy cells into a dormant phase, or “put them to sleep,” as Breslin put it, from which they recovered in a day or so. “The data presented here indicates that cancer cells having fragile lysosomal membranes — as compared to non-cancerous cells — are susceptible to lysosomotropic agent-induced cell death,” the study says. “Therefore, targeting lysosomal membrane stabiltiy represents a novel approach to induce cancer-specific cell death.”
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Source: reset.me
