Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in the world (World Cancer Research Fund International). Colostomy, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and biological therapy are among the most common treatment for colorectal cancer. These treatments may be used by itself or in combination. One of the most commonly used drugs for the treatment of colorectal cancer is 5-fluorouracil (5-FU). 5-FU is a cell cycle–specific, S-phase–dependent fluorinated pyrimidine analogue (Yim, et al., 2006). Due to its short biological half-life, it is always used in combination with other drugs to enhance its drug effect. However, toxicity and drug resistance often occurred in anticancer drugs combination therapy, thus, there are many ongoing research to look for the effect of combination treatment of anticancer drugs with phytochemical or its active compounds and attempted to use natural products in anticancer therapy
More than 25% of drugs used during the last 20 years are directly derived from plants, while the other 25% are chemically altered natural products (Amin et al., 2009). The advantage of using plant derivatives for cancer treatment is due to their relatively non-toxic nature and availability in an ingestive form (Amin et al., 2009). Some of the most commonly used anticancer drugs from plants are vinblastine, vincristine, camptothecin , etoposide and many more (Srivastava et al., 2005).There are many suggested combination of phytochemical with currently available anticancer drug that being researched. This includes the combination of cilostazol and Ginkgo biloba extract to protect against cisplatin-induced cochleo-vestibular dysfunction (Tian et al., 2013) and the combination of catechins from green tea and anti-cancer drugs to increase e...
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Srivastava, V., Negi, A. S., Kumar, J.K., Gupta, M.M.and Khanuja, S.P.S. (2005) ‘Plant-based anticancer molecules: A chemical and biological profile of some important leads’, Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry, pp: 5892–5908.
Suganuma, M., Saha, A. and Fujiki, H. (2010) ‘New cancer treatment strategy using combination of green tea catechins and anticancer drugs’, Cancer Sci. pp : 317-323.
Yim, E.K., Lee, S.B., Lee, K.H.,Kim, C.J. and Park, J.S. (2006) ‘Analysis of the in vitro synergistic effect of 5-fluorouracil and cisplatin on cervical carcinoma cells’, Int. J. Gynecol. Cancer, pp: 1321-1329.
Internet sources
World cancer research foundation. Available at
http://www.wcrf.org/cancer_statistics/data_specific_cancers/colorectal_cancer_statistics.php. Assessed on 24/2/2014