Effects of Garlic Oil on Proliferation and Apoptosis of Pancreatic Cancer Cells

Pancreatic cancer, the fourth leading cause of cancerrelated death, possesses a very poor prognosis and an extremely high death/incidence ratio of approximately 99%, which is not only due to its little possibility of surgical resection but also the increasing resistance to almost all chemotherapeutic agents (Lange et al., 2012; Jiang et al., 2012; Ren et al., 2012). Therefore multidisciplinary therapeutic approaches and new anticancer pharmaceuticals are necessary to prevent pancreatic cancer from occurring and to improve its outcome. Recently, there has been encouraging progress, from a western perspective, in the cancer research field regarding the Chinese Herbal Medicines (CHM) as an effective therapeutic method to improve cancer survival, to increase tumor response, or to reduce chemotherapy toxicity and to keep cancer from recurring (Qi et al., 2010). For example, it has been demonstrated that garlic (allium sativum) possesses anti-mutagenic or anti-proliferative properties that can be used in anticancer interventions. Another report presents that garlic oil can exhibit significant protection against N-nitrosodiethylamineinduced hepatocarcinogenesis (Agarwal at al., 2007; Zhang at al., 2012). Thus, garlic oil is believed to be a promising cancer chemo-preventive constituent (Kim et al., 2011). It was reported that garlic contains water soluble