The plants Cassia auriculata and Cassia alata are found in south-east Asia and are popular both as ornamental plants and for their medicinal uses. Not only is it believed that they have diabetes-tackling properties, but they may be able to lower obesity as they can lower your lipid or fat levels. According to Dr Habtemariam, ‘Diabetes is a huge burden to society in general. The search for treatments is making the NHS bankrupt, and this problem is likely to get worse in the next decade. There is no known drug of cure and so, all in all, it’s a huge incentive for us to carry out research in this field’.
The research involves finding ways to isolate and identify the ‘active ingredients’ for treating diabetes. So far the team has found that the plants could offer fewer adverse effects, has anti-oxidant properties, which benefits diabetes treatment, and that one of the compounds isolated from the plant, kaempferol 3-O-rutinoside, has proved to be more than eight times more potent than the standard anti-diabetic drug, acarbose.
‘Our other most interesting finding is that many of the active ingredients from the Cassia auriculata plant work through a process called ‘synergism’ — in other words, they work together to produce an effect greater than the sum of their individual effects,’ says Dr Habtemariam. ‘Overall, this suggests that the crude plant extract has lots of potential to be used clinically for treating diabetes and associated diseases.’
However, at present this research requires further study and validation, which Dr Habtemariam says won’t be a problem at the University of Greenwich: ‘We have both the facilities and the expertise to carry out this research: to isolate chemicals of biological interest, and then to identify what they are. We are only at the drug discovery stage but moving to the clinical trial stage is a very definite goal.’
