Abstract

Cancer being one of the distressing diseases requires special consideration with respect to therapeutics. Despite the availability of a number of chemotherapeutic drugs, vast majority of cancer cases relapse which might be due to the development of drug resistance. Moreover, these chemotherapeutics possess severe side effects and are expensive. Taken these drawbacks of chemotherapeutics into account, an emerging role of traditional Indian medicinal system has been studied and evaluated in a variety of tumors ranging from solid tumors to haematological malignancies. Several such medicinal plants such as curcumin, cinnamon, ashwagandha, ginger, long pepper, etc have shown promising anti-tumor effect alone or as adjuvant chemotherapy. Furthermore, the effect of these medicinal plants on drug resistant tumor cells have also been investigated and found that the proteins up regulated while development of drug resistance such as P-glycoprotein have been suppressed by these medicinal plants suggesting their chemo-sensitizing role in treatment of cancer.

Keywords: Cancer; Indian medicinal system; Cinnamon; Curcumin; Ginger; Long pepper; Ashwagandha