Cancer and Traditional Plant Knowledge, an Interesting Field to Explore: Data from the Catalan Linguistic Area

Cancer is the second cause of death in the world and is foreseen to be responsible for about 16 million deaths in 2040. Approximately, 60% of the drugs used to treat cancer are of natural origin. Besides the extensive use of some of these drugs in therapies, such as those derived from the genus Taxus, a significant number of plants have revealed themselves as useful against cancer in recent years. The field of ethnobotany focuses on documenting traditional knowledge associated with plants, constituting a starting point to uncover the potential of new plant-based drugs to treat or prevent, in this case, tumour diseases and side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. From a series of extensive ethnobotanical prospections across the Catalan linguistic area (CLA), we have recorded uses for 41 taxa with antitumour effects. The two most quoted botanical families are Asteraceae and Ranunculaceae, and the most frequently reported species is Ranunculus parnassifolius, a high-mountain species, which is widely collected for this purpose. The reported species have been used to treat an important number of cancer types, focusing on preventive, palliative, and curative uses, as well as to deal with the side effects of conventional treatments. Comparing our results in CLA with previous data available in the most comprehensive databases of pharmacology and a review of cytotoxicity assays revealed that for the several species reported here, there was no previous evidence of traditional uses against cancer. Despite the need for further analyses to experimentally validate the information presented here, combining traditional uses and phylogenetically-informed strategies to phytochemical and pharmacological research would represent new avenues to establish more integrative approaches, hence improving the ability to select new candidate taxa in cancer research.

This research was funded by projects 2017SGR001116 and CLT051/21/000005 from the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government), and PRO2020/2021/2022-S02-VALLES from the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC, Catalan Academy of Sciences and Humanities). AG benefited from a predoctoral grant from the Universitat de Barcelona (APIF 2015-2018) and from a postdoctoral contract of project CGL2017-84297-R of the Spanish government, and from a postdoctoral grant from the Universitat de Barcelona (Margarita Salas 2022-2024), subsidised by NextGeneration EU funds.

Introduction Results and Discussion General Data Most Recurrent Taxa Used by Informants in Prospected Area Wild and Cultivated Vegetables and Their Role against Cancer Plants for Dealing with Side Effects of Cancer Treatments Pharmacological Activity Review Materials and Methods Studied Area Databasing and Data Selection Pharmacological Activity Review Conclusions Author Contributions Funding Institutional Review Board Statement Informed Consent Statement Data Availability Statement Acknowledgments Conflicts of Interest References