The herb belongs to the family Amaranthaceae and is also called summer cypress or kochia. It is found all over China, Japan, and Korea. The fruit of the plant is used for skin diseases and malignant tumors of the breast, head and neck in traditional Chinese medicine (Kim et al. 2006). The plant has anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic properties also (Lee et al. 2011). The active compounds isolated from it are saponins, triterpenoid glycosides (Wen et al. 1995), and flavone glycosides (Xu et al. 2014). The anticancer activity of K. scoparia has been studied in immortal neuroblastoma cells (Mazzio and Soliman 2009) and human hepatocellular carcinoma HepG2 cells (Wang et al. 2014).
The anti-carcinoma potential of K. scoparia is also investigated on human OSCC cell lines, and it is reported that methanol extract of mature fruit inhibited cell proliferation in OSCC via inducing apoptosis by activation of caspase-3 and caspase- 9 in a dose-dependent manner. The inhibitory effects of K. scoparia were also seen in in vivo studies, where tumor growth inhibition and tumor cell apoptosis were observed in mice model (Han et al. 2016).
