More than two years ago, the same UC Berkeley researchers discovered that injecting the lunasin gene into cancer cells in a culture stopped cell division. In their latest work, they tested whether the lunasin protein could prevent normal cells from becoming cancerous in both cell cultures and in mice.
In the study, varying doses of lunasin were applied to groups of mice over a period of 19 weeks. They were compared with a control group that had received no lunasin treatments. After the mice were exposed to chemical carcinogens, the group that had received the highest lunasin dose of 125 micrograms twice a week had a 70 percent lower incidence of tumors than the control group.
"In the high dose group, some mice did develop some tumors, but there were fewer tumors per mouse and there was a two-week delay in their appearance compared with the control group," said Ben O. de Lumen, nutritional sciences professor in UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources and principal investigator of the study.
De Lumen is a member of UC Berkeley's Health Sciences Initiative, a partnership among biomedical sciences and technology programs geared towards advancing research into today's major health problems. He heads the lab where lunasin's anti-cancer properties were first discovered, and where Alfredo Galvez, lead author of the study, worked as a post-doc researcher. Other authors of the report include Na Chen, a doctoral student, and Janet Macasieb, an undergraduate student, both from the Division of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology at UC Berkeley.
The researchers got clues on how lunasin wor
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Contact: Sarah Yang
scy@pa.urel.berkeley.edu
510-643-7741
University of California - Berkeley
15-Oct-2001