Curcumol Induces Apoptosis in SPC-A-1 Human Lung AC Cells and Anti-neoplastic Effects in Tumor Bearing Mice

Curcuma rhizomes are herbal remedies commonly used in oriental medicines such as Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine (Shishodia et al., 2005; Xia et al., 2005). During the past twenty years, curcumin, one of the key active substances of curcuma rhizomes attracted great interests in biomedical research (Shishodia et al., 2005; Anand et al., 2007). So far, thousands of research papers have been published with curcumin. The research interests have been extended to other active substances of curcuma rhizomes recently. Curcumol, a sesquiterpene is another active substance of curcuma rhizomes (Carey et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2014). Similar to curcumin, curcumol also displayed a variety of beneficial pharmacological activities in preclinical studies, including anti-inflammation (Chen et al., 2014), anti-rheumatism (Wang et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2014; Yu et al., 2014) and anti-seizure (Ding et al., 2014) and hepato-protection (Chen et al., 2014). Moreover, the anti-neoplastic effects of curcumol have been well reported in various cell culture models (Wang et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2011; Tian et al., 2012; Jing et al., 2013; Guo et al., 2014). However, the in vivo anti-cancer efficacy of curcumol remained unclear. To