Researchers from the United Kingdom have just made a major breakthrough in cancer research by demonstrating for the first time that curcumin, a turmeric extract, not only is an effective adjunct agent to enhance conventional chemotherapy but may be even more effective on its own. Curcumin has also been found to be about one hundred times less toxic than chemotherapy and was more effective at killing colorectal cancer stem cells from patients than a popular combination of conventional drugs.
Published in September 2015 in Cancer Letters, the study evaluated curcumin as a possible adjunct to enhance chemotherapy treatment of colorectal cancer.
The curcumin was able to inhibit what is known as “spheroid formation,” a configuration of cells that indicates cancer progression driven by cancer stem cells. This and other curcumin activities indicate that curcumin is capable of targeting the stem cells at the heart of many cancer malignancies.