Neem tree may hold clues for HIV treatment

An Indian-origin researcher has hinted that extracts from neem tree, profuse in tropical and subtropical areas, may thwart the virus from multiplying. Sonia Arora, an assistant professor at Kean University in New Jersey, is delving into understanding the curative properties of the neem tree in fighting the virus that causes AIDS.
Her preliminary results seem to indicate that there are compounds in neem extracts that target a protein essential for HIV to replicate. If further studies support her findings, Arora`s work may give clinicians and drug developers a new HIV-AIDS therapy to pursue. Extracts from neem leaves, bark and flowers are used throughout the Indian subcontinent to fight against pathogenic bacteria and fungi.
“The farther you go into the villages of India, the more uses of neem you see,” said Arora.
Tree branches are used instead of toothpaste and toothbrushes to keep teeth and gums healthy, and neem extracts are used to control the spread of malaria. Practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine, a form of traditional Indian alternative medicine, even prescribe neem extracts, in combination with other herbs, to treat cardiovascular diseases and control diabetes. The neem tree, whose species name is Azadirachta indica and which belongs to the mahogany family, also grows in east Africa.
Arora`s scientific training gave her expertise in the cellular biology of cancer, pharmacology, bioinformatics and structural biology.
When she established her laboratory with a new research direction at Kean University in 2008, Arora decided to combine her knowledge with her long-time fascination with natural products. The neem tree beckoned. Arora dived into the scientific literature to see what was known about neem extracts. During the course of her reading, Arora stumbled across two reports that showed that when HIV-AIDS patients in Nigeria and India were given neem extracts, the amount of HIV particles in their blood dropped. Intrigued, Arora decided to see if she could figure out what was in the neem extract that seemed to fight off the virus.
She turned to bioinformatics and structural biology to see what insights could be gleaned from making computer models of HIV proteins with compounds known to be in neem extracts.
From the literature, she and her students found 20 compounds present in various types of neem extracts. When they modelled these compounds against the proteins critical for the HIV life-cycle, Arora and her team discovered that most of the neem compounds attacked the HIV protease, a protein essential for making new copies of the virus.
Arora`s group is now working on test-tube experiments to see if the computer models hold up with actual samples. If her work bears out, Arora is hopeful that the neem tree will give a cheaper and more accessible way to fight the HIV-AIDS epidemic in developing countries, where current therapies are priced at levels out of reach of many people.
“And, of course,” she noted, “there is the potential of discovering new drugs based on the molecules present in neem.” (ANI) The finding was published in Nature Neuroscience and PNAS.
Vitamin E ‘guards against cancers’: Two forms of vitamin E – gamma and delta-tocopherols – found in soybean, canola and corn oils as well as nuts do prevent colon, lung, breast and prostate cancers, according to a new study. The question of whether vitamin E prevents or promotes cancer has been widely debated in scientific journals and in the news media. “There are studies suggesting that vitamin E actually increases the risk of cancer and decreases bone density,” said Chung S. Yang, director of the Center for Cancer Prevention Research, at Rutgers Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy and the Cancer Institute of New Jersey.
“Our message is that the vitamin E form of gamma-tocopherols, the most abundant form of vitamin E in the American diet, and delta-tocopherols, also found in vegetable oils, are beneficial in preventing cancers while the form of vitamin E, alpha- tocopherol, the most commonly used in vitamin E supplements, has no such benefit.” Yang and colleagues, Nanjoo Suh and Ah-Ng Tony Kong discussed animal studies done at Rutgers as well as human epidemiological studies that have examined the connection between vitamin E and cancer.
Yang said Rutgers scientists conducting animal studies for colon, lung, breast and prostate cancer found that the forms of vitamin E in vegetable oils, gamma and delta-tocopherols, prevent cancer formation and growth in animal models. “When animals are exposed to cancer-causing substances, the group that was fed these tocopherols in their diet had fewer and smaller tumors,” Yang said.
“When cancer cells were injected into mice these tocopherols also slowed down the development of tumors.” In researching colon cancer, Yang pointed to another recently published paper that the delta-tocopherol form of vitamin E was more effective than other forms of vitamin E in suppressing the development of colon cancer in rats.
This is good news for cancer research. Recently, in one of the largest prostate cancer clinical trials in the United States and Canada, scientists found that the most commonly used form of vitamin E supplements, alpha-tocopherol, not only did not prevent prostate cancer, but its use significantly increased the risk of this disease among healthy men.
This is why, Yang insisted, it is important to distinguish between the different forms of vitamin E and conduct more research on its cancer preventive and other biological effects. “For people who think that they need to take vitamin E supplements,” Yang said, “taking a mixture of vitamin E that resembles what is in our diet would be the most prudent supplement to take.” The study has been published in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.