An WW, Kanazawa Y, Ozawa M, Nakaya K, Saito T, Tanaka A, Bradley WG. Dendritic cell differentiation and tumor cell apoptosis induced by components of a poly-phenylpropanoid polysaccharide complex. Anticancer Res. 2010 Feb;30(2):613-22. PubMed PMID: 20332479.
Summary:
This paper describes the results of collaboration between TBRI and Dr. Kazuyasu Nakaya’s laboratory in Niigata University, Japan. The findings published in this article are an extension of the our first publication (Bradley et al, 2003) that described the ability of the pine cone extract to enhance the development of human dendritic cells, cells critical for the initiation of immune responses against invading pathogens, cancer cells, and vaccines. In this paper we describe the discovery of two distinctive activities within the pine cone extract. The first activity, found to be restricted to a fraction containing rather large molecules, is associated with an ability to induce the generation and maturation of dendritic cells derived from murine bone marrow. The second activity discovered was found to be contained within a fraction consisting of much smaller molecules. The activity in this fraction is associated with the ability to induce programmed cell death (apoptosis) in several human cancer cell lines. This means that the pine cone extract could potentially induce cell death in tumor or infected cells and then activate dendritic cells that could initiate an immune response against the tumor or infection.