07/08/2026
KATMON’S PROMISING EDGE🌿
Cancer cells can sometimes learn to resist chemotherapy, making drugs that once worked much less effective. In a UP Diliman study, however, a fraction taken from Katmon leaves stayed active even against colorectal cancer cells with a high level of drug resistance.
Researchers studied Dillenia philippinensis, or Katmon, a plant endemic to the Philippines. Among the leaf fractions they tested, one called DP1 showed the strongest activity against four breast and colorectal cancer cell lines.
The most interesting result came from HCT-15/Dox, a colorectal cancer cell line made highly resistant to the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin.
Doxorubicin became about 100 times less potent against these resistant cells compared with the original HCT-15 cells. DP1, on the other hand, became only about 2.5 times less potent. In other words, the Katmon fraction kept much more of its activity even as the cancer cells became harder to kill.
The researchers also found that DP1 could interfere with P-glycoprotein, one of the proteins cancer cells can use to pump drugs back out before they have enough time to work. At higher concentrations, DP1 reduced this pumping activity in the highly resistant cells.
The findings are promising, but they are still early. The experiments were done on cultured cells in the laboratory, not on patients, and researchers tested a specially prepared fraction from Katmon leaves rather than the leaves themselves.
Further studies are needed to identify which compounds are responsible and whether they can produce the same effects safely in animals and eventually in humans.
For now, Katmon gives researchers another interesting lead in the search for ways to understand and potentially overcome multidrug resistance in cancer.
The study was conducted by researchers from the UP Diliman Institute of Biology and published in the Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention.
