A new study just released by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic reveals that resveratrol, when administered in combination with rapamycin (a drug with immunosuppressant effects considered to be a potentially promising breast cancer treatment), was twice as effective in killing breast cancer cells as when rapamycin was administered alone. In effect, the resveratrol prevented the breast cancer cells from becoming resistant to rapamycin. According to the study’s lead, Charis Eng, MD and Ph.D., "Rapamycin has been used in clinical trials as a cancer treatment. Unfortunately, after a while, the cancer cells develop resistance to rapamycin…Our findings show that resveratrol seems to mitigate rapamycin-induced drug resistance in breast cancers…”
What’s more, the study also administered resveratrol alone (without rapamycin) to the breast cancer cells and found that resveratrol slowed or stopped their growth in a dose dependent manner.
This study concluded that resveratrol might be a “powerful integrative medicine adjunct to traditional chemotherapy.”
Editor’s Note: Past studies have revealed that resveratrol prevents the first step that occurs when estrogen begins the process that leads to breast cancer and that resveratrol also strongly inhibits BRCA1-mutant tumor growth.
