A new study in International Journal of Cancer indicates that curcumin and its derivatives may be used to treat glioblastoma, one of the most dangerous forms of cancer with extremely poor prognosis. 

The study shows that treatment with intranasally delivered curcumin or its derivatives got 50% of mice with glioblastoma into remission.  Similar efficacy was achieved when curcumin in a liquid encapsulated form was delivered by intraperitoneal infusion into the mice. 

Treatment with curcumin and its derivatives was found to have a favorable effect on many tumor-associated biomarkers indicating that curcumin and similar compounds can be used to treat glioblastoma.

Glioblastoma is not the only cancer that curcumin can help treat.  Another study recently published in the journal Cell Cycle suggests that curcumin can also help pancreatic cancer.

The study shows that pancreatic cancer can be turned by chemotherapy into cancer stem cells which are resistant to chemotherapeutic treatments and treatment with curcumin can help suppress the generation of the cancer stem cells. (David Liu) 

Sumit Mukherjee, Juliet Baidoo, Angela Fried, Doaa Atwi, Sukanta Dolai,  John Boockvar, Marc Symons, Rosamaria Ruggieri, Krishnaswami Raja, Probal Banerjee, Curcumin changes the polarity of tumor-associated microglia and eliminates glioblastoma, International Journal of Cancer, First published: 24 September 2016