Two Faces of Curcumin; A Molecular Nutrition and an Anti-Cancer Agent

Citation: Saleh TA (2016) Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering Spectroscopy for Pharmaceutical Determination. Int J Nanomater Nanotechnol Nanomed 2(1): 029-022. DOI: 10.17352/2455-3492.000012 J hed V, Zarrabi A, Hajisadeghian M (2017) Two Faces of Curcumin; A Molecular Nutrition and an A ti-Cancer Agent. Int J Nanomater Nanotechnol Nanomed 3(1): 19-02 . DOI: http://doi.org/10.17352/2455-3492.000016 Abstract


Introduction
Currently, the most common way to treat cancer is chemotherapy. While toxic and expensive, the possibility of treatment with chemotherapy agents is very low [1,2]. Among cancers, breast cancer is the second leading cause of death for women in the world Fateme et al. 2011, and [3]. The use of herbal medicine is one of the easiest and the most inexpensive ways to prevent and treat cancer [2]. Curcumin (CUR), the active ingredient of turmeric spice and famous Hindi; solid gold. Also, it has a broad use as a food habit in Japan and South Asia [4] is one of the herbal medicines that is recently been highlighted in cancer treatment [5,6,7]. It has been proven that curcumin, as the main component of turmeric, has anti-carcinogenic and anti-proliferative features [8,9,10]. Moreover, it has been reported that telomerase activity in MCF-7 cells was increased by curcumin treatment [11]. Despite many medicinal features of curcumin, its low solubility and instability in aqueous media are major drawbacks which prevent its widespread applications [12]. To improve this limitations, variety of formulations have been proposed [13].
Cyclodextrins are donut-shaped sugar molecules [14,15,16,17] with hydrophobic cavity and hydrophilic shell, which enables them to increase the aqueous solubility of hydrophobic guests [2]. Thus, cyclodextrins have gained more attention as drug carriers in pharmaceutical industries [18].
According to the internal cavity size [19], -cyclodextrins

Inclusion complex formation
CD-CUR inclusion complex was prepared by freeze dry method [19]. Briefl y, 40 mg CD and 12 mg CUR were dissolved

Statistical analysis
One way ANOVA test and LSD test in SPSS software version 17.00 was used for statistical analysis of data and the T test has been used for independent samples.

DSC
Differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) is useful tool for recognition of host-guest inclusion complexes. It is concluded from DSC analysis that the inclusion complex is formed when exothermic or endothermic peak of the guest molecule is disappeared. The results of this analysis is shown is Figure   1. The curve of CUR shows an endothermic peak at 178 0 C (melting temperature of CUR), whereas that of CD has an endothermic peak at 124 o C which is attributed to the removal of water molecules from the cavity. However, inclusion complex is formed when water molecules are replaced by less polar molecule like curcumin. Thus, the melting point of curcumin could be infl uenced after coverage by CD.

FTIR
FTIR spectroscopy was used to ascertain the formation of the CD-CUR inclusion complex (Figure 2). By comparing the spectra of inclusion complex and CUR it was revealed that the benzene ring peak at 1627.

MTT assay
The results of cytotoxicity effect of fi ve different concentrations of CUR and CD-CUR inclusion complex on  According to the results of this test, amount of Sig.
(2-tailed) was 0.035 that is lower than 0.05m which shows a signifi cant different between two treatments ( Figure 3).
Moreover, it shows that the incubation time had a signifi cant effect on the anti-proliferative effect of CUR-CD.

Cell morphology studies
The