ATPS-36: ETHNOMEDICAL SURVEY AND SCIENTIFIC VALIDATION OF ANTICANCER ACTIVITIES OF SOME NIGERIAN HERBAL PLANTS

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in many countries and there is no cure for different forms of the disease. In Africa, traditional medicine practitioners (TMP) claim to have effective treatments for what they diagnose as “cancers”. This study used tissue culture and cancer cell viability techniques to validate the rationale for the folkloric use of herbal medications by TMP. We worked with a well-established TMP (Engineer Ali Musa Audu) to collect medicinal plants used in the treatment of cancers (daji) in the North-east geopolitical zone of Nigeria. We identified 42 plants that are used in the folkloric treatment of cancers and the botanical names were authenticated by a Taxonomist. The plant parts used in folkloric medicine were defatted with petroleum ether and further extracted with ethanol. The dried ethanol extracts were screened for anticancer cell viability activities against well-characterized brain tumour (A171, U87 and U1242) and breast cancer (231) cell lines. We screened 42 extracts and established robust anticancer cell viability activities of 8 herbal plants with concentration that inhibited 50% cell viability of less than 62.0 mg/ml. Three of the plant extracts were also tested on normal human astrocytes and showed toxicity only at higher concentration of 250.0 mg/ml. This is the first report of anticancer activities of medicinal plants from the North-east geopolitical zone of Nigeria.