In continuation of my update on green tea
Researchers lead by Dr. Thomas Smith at The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center
and his colleagues at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, have found that a compound found in green tea shows
great promise for the development of drugs to treat two types of tumors
and a deadly congenital disease.
Dr. Smith and his colleagues discovered
that two compounds found naturally in green tea are able to compensate
for this genetic disorder by turning off GDH in isolated and when the
green tea compounds were administered orally. The Smith lab also used
X-ray crystallography to determine the atomic structure of these green
tea compounds bound to the enzyme. With this atomic information, they
hope to be able to modify these natural compounds to design and develop
better drugs.
Interestingly, two other research groups
have validated and extended these findings to demonstrate that blocking
GDH with green tea is very effective at killing two different kinds of
tumors; glioblastomas, an aggressive type of brain tumor, and tuberous
sclerosis complex disorder, a genetic disease that causes non-malignant
tumors to grow on a number of organs.
