Honey Bee Propolis Stops Prostate Cancers

More great news confirming the benefits of a natural product, honey bee propolis - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120504110402.htm


An over-the-counter natural remedy derived from honeybee hives arrests the growth of prostate cancer cells and tumors in mice, according to a new paper from researchers at the University of Chicago Medicine.

Caffeic acid phenethyl ester, or CAPE, is a compound isolated from honeybee hive propolis, the resin used by bees to patch up holes in hives. Propolis has been used for centuries as a natural remedy for conditions ranging from sore throats and allergies to burns and cancer. But the compound has not gained acceptance in the clinic due to scientific questions about its effect on cells.
In a paper published in Cancer Prevention Research, researchers combined traditional cancer research methods with cutting-edge proteomics to find that CAPE arrests early-stage prostate cancer by shutting down the tumor cells' system for detecting sources of nutrition.

"If you feed CAPE to mice daily, their tumors will stop growing. After several weeks, if you stop the treatment, the tumors will begin to grow again at their original pace," said Richard B. Jones, PhD, assistant professor in the Ben May Department for Cancer Research and Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology and senior author of the study. "So it doesn't kill the cancer, but it basically will indefinitely stop prostate cancer proliferation."

"A typical problem in bringing some of these herbal remedies into the clinic is that nobody knows how they act, nobody knows the mechanism, and therefore researchers are typically very hesitant to add them to any pharmaceutical treatment strategy," Jones said. "Now we'll actually be able to systematically demonstrate the parts of cell physiology that are affected by these compounds."

Another important fact to take note of is that no one is disputing the effectiveness of natural remedies that have been around for hundreds of years. It's just that they haven't developed the technology to discover how they work (as was the case here until recent developments in analysis) and without knowing how they work, they are reluctant to recommend them, despite their proven safe track record. In fact, they feel safer recommending medications with hundreds of "side" effects that carry a risk of death with them, than recommending safer, natural substances with no known associated side effects or deaths, simply because they don't understand how they work.

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