Table 4.

Protective activity of CA in radiotherapy treatment.

Aim	Model	Treatment Conditions	Finding	Reference
To investigate the radioprotective potential of CA against γ radiation-induced cellular changes	In vitro: human peripheral blood lymphocytes	CA 66 µM for 30 min before γ radiation (1, 2, 3 y, and 4 Gy)	Pre-treatment with CA before γ radiation treatment showed significant cell protection (around 80–85%). Overall, CA protects lymphocytes by decreasing (p < 0.01) DNA damage in micronucleus frequencies (MNs) by comet assay, decreasing the level of lipid peroxidation index by TBARS, and improving the antioxidant activity by increasing GSH, SOD, CAT, and GPx levels.	[148]
To investigate the protective role of CA in human epidermal keratinocytes and carcinogenesis induced by cancer treatments with ionizing radiation (γ or X-rays)	In vitro: human epidermal keratinocyte line HaCaT cells	0.1 µg/mL of CA for 24 h prior to γ radiation at 4 Gy (1 Gy/min) for 10 min.	Pre-treatment with CA increased the cell survival significantly (p < 0.05) by about 40% at 8 Gy level and reduced ROS production by 38% (p < 0.05), which was induced radiation. CA pre-treatment considerably reduced the number of foci of DNA strand breaks at each time point compared to the control.	[149]
To assess the activity of zinc oxide–caffeic acid nanoparticles (ZnO-CA NPs) against cancer cell lines and evaluated on Ehrlich carcinoma treated with γ radiation.	In vitro: human breast cancer MCF-7 cell line and human liver cancer cell line HepG2 In vivo: Ehrlich carcinoma bearing mice (EC mice)	In vitro: Not specified. In vivo: Animals were treated with γ radiation at a dose rate of 0.45 Gy/min in a treatment of 2 Gy/week for 3 successive doses. Animals were injected IP with ZnO-CA NPs (5 mg/100 g) in different experiments.	In vitro: ZnO-CA NPs showed antiproliferative activity against cancer cell lines. The IC50 values of ZnO-CA NPs were 9.22 and 11.53 µg/mL for MCF7 and HepG2, respectively. In vivo: ZnO-CA NPs increased the antitumor activity in mice treated with γ radiation. The LD50 for ZnO-CA NPs was determined in 50.0 mg/100 g bw. The tumor weight decreased from 56.1% (ZnO-CA NPs) to 71.9% in the combination treatment with γ radiation after 4 weeks compared to untreated solid EC tumor.	[150]