Natural Products as New Approaches for Treating Bladder Cancer: From Traditional Medicine to Novel Drug Discovery.

Bladder cancer (BC) is a heterogeneous disease that a tumor develops in the bladder lining and in some cases, the bladder muscle. Chemotherapy and immunotherapy are commonly used to treat bladder cancer. However, chemotherapy can cause burning and irritation in the bladder while BCG immunotherapy, which is the main type of intravesical immunotherapy for bladder cancer, can also cause burning in the bladder and flu-like symptoms. Thus, drugs originating from natural products have attracted much attention due to the reports that they have anti-cancer properties with low adverse effects. In this study, eighty-seven papers that dealt with natural products preventing or treating bladder cancer were reviewed. The studies were classified into the following mechanism: 71 papers on cell death, 5 papers on anti-metastasis, 3 papers on anti-angiogenesis, 1 paper on anti-resistance, and 7 papers on clinical trials. Most of the natural products that induced apoptosis up-regulated proteins such as caspase-3 and caspase-9. Regarding anti-metastasis, MMP-2 and MMP-9 are regulated frequently. Regarding anti-angiogenesis, HIF-1α and VEGF-A are down-regulated frequently. Nevertheless, the number of papers regarding anti-resistance and clinical trial are too few, so more studies are needed. In conclusion, this database will be useful for future in vivo studies of the anti-bladder cancer effect of natural products, in the process of selecting materials used for the experiment.

Efficacy of Combination Treatment with Sodium Metasilicate and Sodium Hypochlorite for Inactivation of Norovirus on Fresh Vegetables.

In recent years, fresh vegetables have frequently been associated with the foodborne transmission of enteric viruses, such as human norovirus (NoV). Therefore, several studies have focused on developing methods to inactivate foodborne viruses for preventing outbreaks of foodborne illnesses. Sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl) is commonly used as a disinfectant, but results in undesirable effects on the appearance and taste of foods and can generate toxic byproducts when it exceeds the allowable concentration. Here, we evaluated the efficacy of a range of NaOCl concentrations (50-1000 ppm) for reducing the amounts of human NoV (NoV GII.4) on lettuce (Lactuca sativa), celery (Apium graveolens L.), and white cabbage (Brassica oleracea ssp. capitata). In addition, the combination treatment of NaOCl and sodium metasilicate (SMS, 0.1-0.5%) pentahydrate was evaluated for its ability to decrease the populations of NoV GII.4 in the three food samples. An immunomagnetic separation procedure combined with reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction was used for virus detection. For lettuce, celery, and cabbage, the NoV GII.4 recovery rates were 57.3% ± 6.5%, 52.5% ± 1.7%, and 60.3% ± 3.9%, respectively, using a glycine/NaCl elution buffer (0.25 M glycine/0.14 M NaCl, pH 9.5). The reductions of NoV GII.4 were 3.17, 3.06, and 3.27 log10 genomic copies/µL for lettuce, celery, and cabbage, respectively, at 1000 ppm NaOCl, while a reduction of ∼3 log10 genomic copies/µL was obtained when the samples were treated with a combination of 100 ppm NaOCl and 0.4% SMS pentahydrate. Taken together, these results demonstrated that combined treatment with NaOCl and SMS pentahydrate was an efficient strategy to reduce the concentration of NaOCl for control of NoV GII.4 contamination in fresh vegetables.