Wound healing plant "lloto"

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,1804270,00.html

Extract from Peruvian plant could speed up wound healing
Alok Jha, science correspondent
Friday June 23, 2006
The Guardian (c)

A traditional medicine from Peru can radically speed up the healing of wounds. In tests, injuries treated by an extract of the plant Anredera diffusa healed more than 40% faster than normal.
Scientists said the plant's active ingredient, oleanolic acid, could speed up the healing of cuts and abrasions as well as easing the pain of ulcer sufferers. "Impaired wound healing may cause severe health-related complications, such as infections and tissue necrosis," write the researchers in the Journal of Natural Products [link below], published today[sic].

"These ailments have spurred the search for wound-healing agents from ethnomedicinal sources."

Gerald Hammond, a chemist at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, who led the research, said that his work was based on botanical observations on A. diffusa, known locally as lloto, that had been made by Peruvians for centuries. Locals normally use wet lloto leaves as a dressing for wounds. Professor Hammond's team extracted the oleanolic acid, a chemical already available in skin care products.

His team applied oleanolic acid to a group of mice with wounds and measured how quickly they healed. "You measure how much weight it takes to reopen the wound - the more weight it takes compared to the control, the better," said Prof Hammond. His team found that the mice treated with oleanolic acid healed 43% faster than the untreated mice. The best results were obtained by applying 40 micrograms of oleanolic acid per gram of a mouse's body weight.
How oleanolic acid does its job is a mystery. "That's a very difficult question. Wound healing occurs in several stages and each stage is not well understood," said Prof Hammond.

Even so, he said that there was an important market for drugs that could speed recovery from wounds. "People don't pay too much attention to wound healing because most of us have no problem with it," he said. "But there's a number of people that have problems." He cited the example of diabetics, many of whom have problems with wounds because of poor circulation, and people who suffer from bed sores. "It's not cancer, HIV or heart attack, but there is a market for it."

Though Prof Hammond's team only looked at external wounds, oleanolic acid had been used, in previous experiments, to treat a wide range of conditions such as psoriasis and gastric ulcers. For surface wounds, he said the chemical could easily be developed into an ointment.
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<http://0-pubs.acs.org.wam.leeds.ac.uk/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/jnprdf/2006/69/i06/pdf/np0601152.pdf>
As reported in The Guardian [above]

In Vivo Wound-Healing Activity of Oleanolic Acid Derived from the Acid Hydrolysis of Anredera diffusa

Gustavo Moura-Letts,§ Leo´n F. Villegas,† Ana Marcüalo,§ Abraham J. Vaisberg,‡,^ and Gerald B. Hammond*,§,^ Departamento de Ciencias Farmace´uticas, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Apartado 4314, Lima 100, Peru´,
Departamento de Microbiologı´a y Laboratorios de InVestigacio´n y Desarrollo, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Apartado 4314, Lima 100, Peru´,
And Department of Chemistry, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky 40292

Received March 15, 2006
Anredera diffusa is used as a wound-healing agent in traditional Peruvian medicine. Acid hydrolysis of the bioactive ethanolic extract, followed by in vivo activity-guided fractionation, yielded oleanolic acid, with a wound-healing activity equivalent to 42.9% (p < 0.01) above the control. The highest cicatrizant activity in mice was obtained by applying 40 íg of oleanolic acid per gram of body weight.
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