Study On In Vitro Antitumor Activity Of Tripterygium Hypoglaucun (Levl.) Hutch Total Alkaliods And Systematic Antitumor Activity-guided Fractionation

According to the WHO's Annual Report for 1997, there were more than 6.3 million patients died of cancer in 1996, which occupied 12% of the tolal deadth in that year among the global 5.8 billion people. Cancer is the second cause of death after the cardiovascular diseases. At the end of 1999, there were about 40 million patients suffering from cancer worldwide and about 10 million new cases of cancer had been diagnosed each year since 1996. In the WHO's Annual Report for 2001, the incidence and mortality rates of cancer sharply increased 20% compared with the data of 1990. In China, the conditions, trends and severity of cancer was similar to that of the global. Governments, research agents and Pharmaceuticals companies keep paying great attentions and taking great measures to the development of new antitumor drugs. More and more new antitumor drugs have been produced to target mechanisms of tumor forming rather than cytotoxicity. In recent decades, apoptosis has become an important target for antitumor drug discovery and development and cancer therapy. Even more, some researchers took apoptosis as an index to evaluate new antitumor drugs. Among so many ways for drug discovery and development, it is one of the most effective methods to get antitumor agents and leading compounds for new antitumor drugs developed from natural products. Chinese traditional and herbal drugs are great treasures of traditional Chinese medicine. Tripterygium Hypoglaucun (Levl.) Hutch (THH), a Chinese herbal medicine, has been used in therapy of some tumors by some minority nationalities. The extracts of this herbal showed some in vivo antitumor activity in animal models according to some researchers' results. Our former research revealed that THH total alkaloids, extracted from the THH root without bark, could induce apoptosis of tumor cell lines. However, there was no systemic study on the antitumor activity of THH total alkaloids or separation and analysis of its effective components.Objective: Taken the extract of total alkaloids from the THH root without bark as our...