Can Rhus Coriaria be a Potential, Natural, Treatment for Prostate Cancer?

The defining hallmarks of cancer render tumours as an active and evolving tissue, capable of evading anti-cancer therapies. Highly metastatic cancers such as triple negative breast cancer, colorectal cancer and prostate cancer have some of the highest mortality rates owing to rapid growth, resistance to cell death and acquisition of invasive and angiogenic traits. Currently, there are no defined treatments for such cancers in averting metastasis and re-occurrence. Plant-derived phytochemicals are potentially invaluable sources of anti-cancer agents in combinational therapies. Rhus coriaria, also known as Sumac, is a common spice, which has extensive medicinal properties frequently referred to in traditional herbal remedies. Treating triple negative breast cancer and colon cancer cell lines with extracts of Rhus coriaria has shown profound and diverse anti-cancer effects previously. Here we used a variety of ‘normal’ and prostate cancer (PrCa) cell lines as our in vitro model in order to dissect the benefits of Sumac using a cell-based assay and informatic analysis. Our data clearly depicted increased killing effects of Sumac in comparison to Docetaxel and Vinblastine. However, normal cells were affected to a greater extent, than the cancer cells. Hence, our study demonstrates that the potential killing effect of the Rhus coriaria, on the growth of normal cell is equally adverse as on cancer cells. This may be due to exposure of cells to a heterogeneous mixture of hundreds of compounds at a time that could kill normal cells more adversely due to stress