Chaga and Some Other Types of Fungi Inhibit the Growth of Сancer Сells

15:23, August 4, 2020

The parasitic clinker polypore fungus and other tinder fungi have a high antioxydant activity, the international study says

Tinder fungi (growing on wood) have antioxidant properties, exhibit stimulating or inhibitory effects on various processes in cells, in particular, they can suppress cancer cells. The employees of the Center for Fundamental Biotechnology and Bioengineering of the Ural Federal University, who studied the biological activity and chemical composition of several dozen species of polypore fungi, revealed new properties of the Ural tinder fungi.

The chemical composition was studied with the staff of the Natural Medicines Laboratory of Professor Chao Mei Ma from the University of Inner Mongolia (Hohhot, China).

“Professor Ma is one of the world leaders in the study of the chemical composition of natural raw materials. Her laboratory is looking for new active biomolecules in the raw materials of traditional medicine in China, - explains Irina Kiseleva, head of the Department of Experimental Biology and Biotechnology at UrFU. - In partnership with Chinese colleagues, associate professor of our department Alexander Ermoshin during an internship at the University of Inner Mongolia studied the chemical composition of more than a dozen species of wood-destroying fungi growing in the Middle Urals. The chemical composition of the Ural species was compared with the composition of the common chaga in Russia and the ganoderma widely used in Chinese medicine, which has anti-cancer properties.

Scientists have found that all studied types of fungi contain terpenoid and steroid molecules. Terpenoids and steroids are classes of chemical compounds with broad functions, and many of them exhibit a variety of biological activities. Terpenoids, for example, include some plant hormones, steroids - animals. Sterols are part of the cell membranes of any organism - both in animals and in plants. Terpenoids are an extremely diverse class of compounds synthesized mainly by plants, for example, these are volatile aromatic substances, carotenoids, vitamin E and others. Mushrooms, as it turned out, synthesize both compounds. In addition, scientists have found that tinder fungi contain essential amino acids, phenols, and flavonoids.

Director of the Department of Biology and Fundamental Medicine Maria Ulitko is studying the biological activity of tinder fungi. As a result of studies on isolated cell lines, biologists found that fungal extracts are not toxic to normal human cells, while a number of samples suppressed the growth of cancer cells in vitro. Alexander Ermoshin and Irina Kiseleva revealed a high antioxidant activity of tinder fungi, as well as their ability to stimulate the early stages of plant growth.

“There is an opinion that traditional medicine methods are either ineffective, or inferior in efficiency to the achievements of modern pharmaceuticals, but this idea of ​​phyto- and fungal therapy is not entirely correct. Plants and fungi have a surprisingly diverse secondary metabolism. Many of the molecules that are in their cells are practically impossible to synthesize even under laboratory conditions because of the complex architecture of the molecules, not to mention the industrial scale,” explains Alexander Ermoshin.

One of the striking examples when traditional medicine helped modern, and plants gave a new effective medicine, is the discovery of Professor Tuu Yuuu (winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology 2015). Several years ago, she discovered artemisin for modern medicine, a highly effective antimalarial agent found in wormwood plants. And she made this discovery not in the laboratory, but by studying old medical treatises.

“While the medicinal properties of many plants are well known, we know much less about mushrooms. In most European countries and in Russia, mushrooms are limitedly used for food and medicine. The world leader in the use of mushrooms for these purposes is China, however, in Russia, for a long time, mowed tinder fungus or chaga have been used as an antitumor and a means of strengthening immunity. Modern medicine has confirmed that chaga contains components that slow down the growth of tumors,” says Irina Kiseleva.

On the basis of this fungus, the pharmaceutical industry produces a number of drugs used in complementary cancer therapy, as well as as prophylactic agents. This is one of the few examples of the use of macroscopic fungi in medicine in our country. In general, a dozen more basidiomycetes are used as medicinal raw materials in the world, while their species diversity in nature is much higher.

“All these facts give hope that in the future we will be able to identify an individual molecule or group of molecules that are promising for use in medicine, for example, in anticancer therapy, as well as plant growth regulators,” the biologist believes. “This makes it necessary and important to study the biological activity of tinder fungi of the Middle Urals and the subsequent development of biotechnological methods for cultivating promising species.”

Scientists of the Center for Fundamental Biotechnology and Bioengineering of the Ural Federal University are conducting research aimed at finding biologically active substances (BAS) in native origin. As a source of biologically active substances, in addition to the plants traditionally used for these purposes, scientists are studying tinder fungi.

Many biologically active substances of natural origin are still used as medicines and are the "gold standard". For example, morphine, which is isolated from poppy as a sleeping pill. It is with him that the newly synthesized molecules are compared in terms of the strength of the anesthetic effect. Or, for example, licorice root syrup is included in most modern cough syrup, motherwort and valerian extracts.