Comparative Effect of Maitake Pro4x with Chemotherapy Breast Cancer Treatment

Background: Conventional treatments for breast cancer involve surgery followed by radiation and hormonal therapy and/or chemotherapy. Some of these treatments have toxic side effects. Because drugs used in chemotherapy affect both cancer and normal cells to varying degrees, researchers are currently developing targeted drugs that only attack cancer cells without affecting normal cells. One approach to this is to found compounds that are more selective and specific, destroying only tumour cells and prevent metastases without harming normal cells. For thousands of years, medicinal mushrooms have been used because of their healing properties. Maitake (Grifola frondosa) is one of the most promising edible and medicinal mushroom, acting promoting the immune system against the tumorigenesis process. Methods: In the in vitro studies, we measured and compared the effect of Maitake Pro4X or Chemotherapy on LM3 Breast Tumour Cells death. Increased concentrations and different time of treatments were employed. In the in vivo studies, we employed breast tumour bearing female BALBc mice 6-8 weeks old, to assayed the effect of Maitake Pro4X with or without chemotherapy measuring the tumour volume, mortality, relative survival and size of tumour necrosis area after treatment. Results: After 5 weeks of treatment in tumour-bearing BALBc mice, we observed that Maitake Pro4X significantly increased the overall survival of animals and reduced the malignancy of breast tumours. We also found that Maitake Pro4X, as chemotherapy, induce cell-death in a dose and time dependent form. Conclusion: The beneficial effects of Maitake D-Fraction Pro4X, if supported by further evidence could be useful for the treatment of cancer patients to reduce the adverse effects of the conventional chemotherapy treatment.