Green Tea Found to Be Effective in Treating Genetic Disorder and Types of Tumors

A compound found in green tea appears to have great potential for the development of drugs to treat two types of tumors and a lethal congenital disease.

The discovery is the result of research led by lead investigator, Dr. Thomas Smith, from the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (St. Louis, MO, USA) and his colleagues at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (PA, USA). Their findings were published August 3, 2011, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH) is found in all living organisms and is responsible for the digestion of amino acids. In animals, GDH is controlled by a complex network of metabolites. For years, it was not clear why animals required such regulation but other organisms did not. This was in part answered by the group’s finding that a deadly congenital disease, hyperinsulinism/hyperammonemia (HHS), is caused by the loss of some of this regulation. In this disorder, patients (usually children) respond to the consumption of protein by over secreting insulin, becoming severely hypoglycemic, frequently leading to death.

Using atomic structures to understand the differences between animals and plants, Dr. Smith and his colleagues found out that two compounds found naturally in green tea are able to compensate for this genetic disorder by switching off GDH when the green tea compounds were administered orally. The Smith lab also employed X-ray crystallography to determine the atomic structure of these green tea compounds bound to the enzyme. With this atomic data, they hope to be able to modify these natural compounds to design and develop better drugs.

Significantly, two other research groups have validated and extended these findings to demonstrate that blocking GDH with green tea is very effective at killing two different kinds of tumors; glioblastomas, an aggressive type of brain tumor, and tuberous sclerosis complex disorder, a genetic disease that causes nonmalignant tumors to grow on a number of organs.

“While these compounds from green tea are extremely safe and consumed by millions every day, they have a number of properties that make them difficult to use as actual drugs. Nevertheless, our ongoing collaboration with the Stanley lab shows that there are natural compounds from plants that can control this deadly disorder and, with the atomic structure in hand, can be used as a starting point for further drug design,” the authors wrote in their article.

Related Links:
Donald Danforth Plant Science Center
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia