Complementary and alternative medicine has the potential to enrich conventional therapy
to improve the treatment of various diseases. Patients that suffer from inflammatory bowel disease,
which requires a constant need for medication, have to deal with the adverse effects of repeated
application. Natural products such as Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) possess the potential to
improve symptoms of inflammatory diseases. We investigated the efficacy of EGCG on an inflamed
co-culture model simulating IBD and compared it to the efficacies of four commonly applied active
pharmaceutical ingredients. EGCG (200 µg/mL) strongly stabilized the TEER value of the inflamed
epithelial barrier to 165.7 ± 4.6% after 4 h. Moreover, the full barrier integrity was maintained
even after 48 h. This corresponds to the immunosuppressant 6-Mercaptopurin and the biological
drug Infliximab. The EGCG treatment significantly decreased the release of the pro-inflammatory
cytokines IL-6 (to 0%) and IL-8 (to 14.2%), similar to the effect of the corticosteroid Prednisolone.
Therefore, EGCG has a high potential to be deployed as complementary medicine in IBD. In future
studies, the improvement of EGCG stability is a key factor in increasing the bioavailability in vivo
and fully harnessing the health-improving effects of EGCG
