Pharmaceutical Applications
The plant is also known as red sage and is a member of Salvia family. The dried root of S. miltiorrhiza (Danshen) is extensively used in Chinese medicine to promote blood flow and treat vascular diseases. Danshen is described to have anti-atherosclerotic, antihypertensive, antiplatelet aggregation, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidative effects (Lin and Hsieh 2010). It enhances activity of antioxidative enzyme, nitric oxide synthase, and may scavenge free oxygen radicals. Triterpenoid-enriched extract of the root reduces serum cholesterol and triglyceride (Zhang et al. 2008). Danshen has neuroprotective effects via its various anti-inflammatory activities, and studies have reported reduction in brain edema after treatment with Danshen and an increase in catalase, superoxide dismutase (SOD), and glutathione (GSH) enzyme level of the cerebral cortex and hippocampus region (He et al. 2012). Danshen has shown promising effects in inhibiting tumor cell proliferation and inducing apoptosis in breast cancer, hepatocellular carcinomas, promyelocytic leukemia, and ovary carcinomas.
The alcohol extract of Danshen has been recently studied on the human oral squamous carcinoma (OSCC) cell lines HSC-3 and OC-2. It significantly inhibited the proliferation of OSCC cell lines by activating the caspase-3 apoptosis, thereby demonstrating its chemopreventive potential on human oral cancer cells. In vivo studies have shown that HSC-3 tumor xenograft growth was suppressed by 40% and 69% following treatment with Danshen alcohol extract at 50 and 100 mg/kg, respectively (Wang et al. 2017b). Salvianolic acid B (Sal B) is the water-soluble and most abundant and bioactive compound in Danshen. It is an antioxidant, hepatoprotective, and anti-inflammatory agent and platelet-aggregation inhibitor (Kastrup et al. 2005). Sal B has been shown to decrease squamous cell carcinoma incidence from 65% to 17% (Zhou et al. 2006). In another in vitro study, Sal B was investigated on two OSCC cell lines, CAL27 and SCC4, as well as premalignant leukoplakia cells. It induced significant inhibitory effect on OSCC cell growth by inhibiting TNF-α, MMP9, and many other angiogenesis regulator genes, thus inducing anti-angiogenesis in these cell lines (Yang et al. 2011). Sal B shows promise to be an important anticancer natural product against oral squamous cell carcinoma.
