Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I need help with finding information about oncology in my project. I have narrowed down my project ideas down to trying to find out if herbs has an positive effect in preventing and battling cancer. Such that are possible herbs like Misletoe and Hoxsey effective in curing Cancer and/or it's symptoms. The problem i have is that I dont know how to count cancer cells, which one's to use (like is brain cancer cells function, and are composed the same way as pancreatic cancer cells, or are they different?), and which herbs I can use, and I dont know where to look for the materials to find the answers to these questions.

Hi,

Welcome to Science Buddies! I’m so sorry that we were delayed in responding to your inquiry. Hopefully the following information will be helpful.

This is a fascinating subject and really great idea for a science project. There are a number of approaches that you can take to work on this problem.

First, do a background check on mistletoe and hoxsey to find out if these plants are expected to have any effect on cancer cells. You will find lots of information on these plants that is not in the scientific literature; however, for your project, you should look for references that are in reviewed scientific journals.

For example, here is a paper that was published in Anticancer Research reporting results good antitumor activity of mistoletoe extract on pancreatic patients.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16158932

I could not easily find a similar paper on hoxsey, but perhaps you can find a good scientific source on this topic.

For an experiment, it would be possible to test different concentrations of the plant extracts on the growth of tissue culture cells grown in the laboratory; however, you would need access to a laboratory with the appropriate equipment for doing this type of testing.

There are many types of cancer cells, which originate from different cells in the body. If you do a tissue culture experiment, you would need to choose just one or two types of cancer cells to test:

http://www.livestrong.com/article/10285 ... cer-cells/

http://cancerhelp.cancerresearchuk.org/ ... tic-cancer

Another possibility would be to measure the antioxidant activity of plant extracts. Here is a project from the Science Buddies website that you can use to test antioxidant activity by measuring the effect of a substance on browning of apple slices.

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p001.shtml

And, this project idea includes a detailed protocol for measuring the antioxidant effect of vitamin C, and you could adapt this to measure antioxidant activity for other compounds.

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p044.shtml

The antitumor effect of mistletoe is believed to be due to the lectin content. So another possible experiment would be to measure lectins in these plants and test their effect on the adhesion of red blood cells. Here is some information on this topic.

http://mic.sgmjournals.org/content/149/10/2873.full

http://www.vectorlabs.com/catalog.aspx?dpID=17

For your science project, you want to find a unique experiment that you can do, based on what other researchers have done before you. I hope the suggestions I have made will be helpful, but please do let me know if you have any questions.


Donna Hardy