Antioxidant in Red Wine Kills Cancer Cells

Good news for lovers of red wine — researchers at the University of Pittsburgh found that the pigmentation chemical in grapes that gives red wine and grape skins their color kills human cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact. The compound, an antioxidant that occurs naturally in fruits and vegetables, is a type of anthocyanidin, an antioxidant common in plants.   Scientists knew that anthocyanidins had cancer-fighting properties and decided to focus on one of the most common types, cyanidin-3-rutinoside (C-3-R). Although it is abundant in red wine, scientists used C-3-R purified from black raspberries and tested it on several lines of human leukemia cells. They repeated the test using human lymphoma cells. At low doses of C-3-R, half of the cancer cells in all lines died within 18 hours. When the dose was more than doubled, all of the cancer cells died within 18 hours. Researchers repeated the experiment several times using different types of leukemia cells and got similar results. When treated with C-3-R, cancer cells produced peroxides, a type of free radical that caused them to die. But when C-3-R was used on normal human blood cells, the production of peroxides wasn’t increased and there appeared to be no toxic effects. “Common treatments for leukemia, such as chemotherapy and radiation, often damage healthy cells and tissues and can produce unwanted side effects for many years afterward,” said Dr. Xiao-Ming Yin, an associate professor of pathology at the University of Pittsburg School of Medicine. “So there is an intensive search for more targeted therapies for leukemia worldwide. “If we can reproduce these anticancer effects in animal studies,” Yin said, “this will present a very promising approach for treating a variety of human leukemias and, perhaps, lymphomas as well.” According to the National Cancer Institute, approximately 44,000 new leukemia cases will be diagnosed this year in the United States, and about 22,000 people will die from the disease.

 

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