• 1/12/2005
  • Cape Town, South Africa
  • Ben MacLennan
  • Mail & Guardian Online

A good curry laden with spices can do wonders in keeping a range of diseases including cancer at bay, according to internationally acclaimed researcher Prof Bharat Aggarwal.

“No question about it. I can commend it again and again,” he said in Cape Town on Wednesday.

“It is not only cancer, there are a number of other diseases … right now there are clinical trials going on in the University of California with curcumin for dementia [and] Alzheimer’s.”

Aggarwal was the main speaker on Wednesday at the opening of a three-day conference on the interface between natural products and molecular therapy, at the University of Cape Town’s medical school.

He is a researcher at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre at the University of Texas in the United States, where a major focus of his work has been curcumin, active component of the distinctive yellow curry spice turmeric. He said the dietary spices played an important role in fighting cancer.

“That is becoming increasingly evident from a number of different sources. And that’s why the incidence of cancer in countries like India where these spices are consumed is ten times lower [for] most cancers as compared to countries like the United States.”

Diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s were rare in India — “actually unheard of. And the question is, why? In my mind, curcumin certainly plays a role.

“Even within India, in the south of India they use more curcumin that in the north, and you see the incidence of colon cancer is even further down than in the north.”

Number one cancer among Indian men was head and neck cancer, caused by tobacco and chewing betel nut.

“We have just published a paper on head and neck cancer, and how to suppress that,” he said.

“We have just designed curcumin lozenges that some of these people … take and … and prevent the lesions formation which lead to cancer.”

Clinical trials were being planned in co-operation with the Tata Cancer Institute, the biggest cancer research institute in India.

Aggarwal said curcumin blocked the activation of NF-kappaB, a protein acting as a “master switch” that controlled genes linked to inflammation and by extension to “most of the diseases that we can think of”.

Compounds in a number of other spices and plants also blocked NF-kappaB, including the capsaicin in red chillies, isogeund in cloves and substances in fennel, black pepper and ginger. Cinnamon was very effective for type-2 diabetes.

Aggarwal said while there was much data on the preventive uses of spices, researchers believed they had “tremendous” value in the area of treatment as well. A clinical trial was being planned on the effect of giving curcumin to women with breast cancer that recurred even after they had undergone surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment. “That’s very, very, very important, because there are no drugs right now available for treatment of breast cancers at that stage.

“What I’m saying is, what if you were to give that woman curcumin to begin with, can you help her. And the answer is yes. Our evidence is very strong to indicate that yes, you can.”

He said the benefits of spices had long been known, and were described in the Ayurveda, the ancient Indian treatise on the art of healing.

“But we are using the modern technology to rediscover that knowledge, to verify that knowledge. And we are using the modern knowledge which came up in the last hundred years.”

He said curcumin was first isolated in 1819 and synthesised in 1850, and could now be bought by the kilo for a dollar, which did not make it profitable for pharmaceutical companies.

However he had been approached by an investor and was now one of the founding scientists of a company named Curry Pharmaceuticals.

Curry Pharmaceuticals, set up in 2003 and based in North Carolina in the United States, has identified as its first potential target what it calls “a proprietary dermal formulation of synthetic curcumin” for treating psoriasis.

Aggarwal said though curcumin itself could not be patented, it was possible to obtain patents and make money by combining it with something else to make a better delivery system and better formulation, or coming up with a “structural analogue”.

UCLA researchers reported last year that they had found curcumin was more effective against Alzheimer’s than many other drugs being tested to treat the disease. They found it found it broke up “existing beta amyloid” on rats’ brains and helped prevent accumulation of the destructive plaque.