Hi Prabhakaran, your question is an interesting one, and I would like to offer a medicinal chemist's perspective.

You are correct in saying that curcumin has been reported in all kinds of studies with a range of bioactivities, some of which seem contradictory. At first sight this would appear confusing. However, curcumin is known as a "promiscuous" compound; a "frequent hitter" in screening assays; which can act via pharmacologically nonspecific mechanisms, hence the confusion. This article will offer a little explanation, if you are unfamiliar with the concept:

http://www.nature.com/news/chemistry-chemical-con-artists-foil-drug-discovery-1.15991

So, the simple answer to your question, from a medicinal chemist's point of view, is that curcumin is not a good candidate compound because of its known promiscuous activity, which could well lead to poor reproducibility of any results you might obtain with it. On the other hand, it is a natural product which is licensed for food use and has been shown to have low human toxicity.

My advice would be, by all means try it, but proceed with caution. If you obtain positive results with curcumin, your challenge will be to prove good reproducibility, but the main issue is that you will not be able to link a specific pharmacological mode of action with your observed phenotype(s) given the known promiscuous nature of the compound, and you will have to ask yourself whether that would be an issue for you or not before proceeding.

Hope that proves helpful, and best of luck with your research.

Dear  Prabahkaran Selvam,

This article has some answers to your question: Molecules 2014, 19(8), 11679-11721; doi:10.3390/molecules190811679. Best regards

Dear Daniel Lerda,

Thank you for your help. But I couldn't find the article you refer me to. Could you please give me the link to the paper or just the title would do. Thank you.

Hi Prabhakaran, your question is an interesting one, and I would like to offer a medicinal chemist's perspective.

You are correct in saying that curcumin has been reported in all kinds of studies with a range of bioactivities, some of which seem contradictory. At first sight this would appear confusing. However, curcumin is known as a "promiscuous" compound; a "frequent hitter" in screening assays; which can act via pharmacologically nonspecific mechanisms, hence the confusion. This article will offer a little explanation, if you are unfamiliar with the concept:

http://www.nature.com/news/chemistry-chemical-con-artists-foil-drug-discovery-1.15991

So, the simple answer to your question, from a medicinal chemist's point of view, is that curcumin is not a good candidate compound because of its known promiscuous activity, which could well lead to poor reproducibility of any results you might obtain with it. On the other hand, it is a natural product which is licensed for food use and has been shown to have low human toxicity.

My advice would be, by all means try it, but proceed with caution. If you obtain positive results with curcumin, your challenge will be to prove good reproducibility, but the main issue is that you will not be able to link a specific pharmacological mode of action with your observed phenotype(s) given the known promiscuous nature of the compound, and you will have to ask yourself whether that would be an issue for you or not before proceeding.

Hope that proves helpful, and best of luck with your research.

Hello Mark Thomson,

Thank you so much for sharing some valuable information. The article you shared taught me some necessary knowledge about drug screening and identifying true & promising lead compounds.

Yes it is very much likely that the non-specificity of curcumin could result in some contradictory results and have poor reproducibility as you very clearly said. Besides that curcumin indeed has some great pharmacological potency. It is surprising to see curcumin that proved to be cytoprotective and induced keratinocytes and fibroblasts proliferation in animal models, induce toxicity when tested on these cell lines individually. To my knowledge this contradictory results could be due to one of two reasons or both; firstly  the cytoprotective effect of curcumin in animals might have been brought about by its interaction with other cells possibly via inducing anti-inflammatory cytokines. So in the absence of those immune cells curcumin could have induced toxicity on fibroblasts or keratinocytes. Second possibility is, curcumin is very well known to induce oxidative stress in cancer cells and induce apoptosis. Now most of the studies that tested curcumin’s toxicity used immortalized fibroblast or keratinocyte cell lines which are basically cancer cells. So it is possible that because of the nature of the cell line curcumin might have caused this toxicity. I’m not too sure if anyone has tested curcumin’s toxicity on primary keratinocytes (pNHEK) or primary dermal fibroblasts or in coculture with other supporting cells through which curcumins act.

Dear Prabhakaran Selvam

The article is: "Review of Natural Compounds for Potential Skin Cancer Treatment". Best regards

Thank you so much Dr.Daniel Lerda.