Natural Compounds and How They Inhibit the Growth of Prostate Cancer Cells in the PC3 Cell Line

The word “cancer” is used to describe hundreds of diseases. It is the most common disease to cause morbidity and mortality around the world. Regardless of the strides that have occurred regarding treatment and manipulation of cancer progression, significant advancements are still necessary. For example, chemotherapy sometimes causes undesirable side effects. Therefore, it might be helpful to use natural therapies to treat cancer patients; as such, natural compounds might reduce the adverse side effects of chemotherapy. In this study, we determined the effects of crude methanolic extracts of Pimpinella anisum (anise seed), Ocimum basilicum (basil leaf), Chamaemelum nobile (chamomile leaf), and Verbascum thapsus, (mullein leaf) on inhibiting the growth of PC3 cells. The Alamar Blue Cell Viability assay protocol and fluorescent analysis were used to evaluate the cytotoxicity of the extracts. In this experiment, the PC3 cancer cell line was exposed to the extracts of the above mentioned natural products, at different concentrations, where the findings indicate that the extract, anise (Pimpinella anisum), significantly inhibited the PC3 cell viability at the highest concentration of 537µg/ml. The results also found that both the extracts of basil ( Ocimum basilicum) and chamomile (Chamaemelum nobile) significantly inhibited the PC3 cell viability at its three highest concentrations of 2075 µg/ml, 1038 µg/ml, and 519 µg/ml, with chamomile at 572 µg/ml, 286 µg/ml, and 143 µg/ml, respectively. The last extract, mullein (Verbascum thapsus), significantly inhibited the PC3 cell viability at its highest concentration of 1000 µg/ml