The good news is that an over-the-counter remedy derived from honeybee hives appears to stall the growth of prostate cancer cells. The slightly less than good news is that, while the cells used in tests were human prostate cancer cells, they had been transplanted into mice. The remedy, caffeic acid phenethyl ester, or CAPE, a compound isolated from honeybee hive propolis, has yet to be tested in prostate cancer cells in humans. Still, researchers at the University of Chicago are hopeful. Futurity reports that scientists at the school combined traditional cancer research methods with cutting-edge proteomics to find that CAPE arrests early-stage prostate cancer by shutting down the tumor cells’ system for detecting sources of nutrition. Here’s what they found:
“If you feed CAPE to mice daily, their tumors will stop growing,” says Richard B. Jones, assistant professor in the Ben May Department for Cancer Research and Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology. “After several weeks, if you stop the treatment, the tumors will begin to grow again at their original pace. It doesn’t kill the cancer, but it basically will indefinitely stop prostate cancer proliferation.â€Â
Futurity reports that CAPE was also effective at slowing the growth of human prostate tumors grafted into mice. Six weeks of treatment with the compound decreased tumor volume growth rate by half, but once again, when CAPE treatment was stopped, tumor growth resumed its prior rate.
Read more from Futurity. Read an abstract of the study here.