The nutrient-dense and medicinal plant, Moringa oleifera (MO), has numerous reported therapeutic applications, which makes it a popular nutraceutical on the natural product market. However, scientists have only recently started to verify the therapeutic potential of MO products. Previous studies in our labs have shown potent anti-inflammatory and anticancer effects associated with ethanolic MO whole-leaf extracts. To further investigate potential applications of these MO extracts, our current project uses high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to separate bioactive compounds from the whole extract into distinct subfractions. We hypothesized that these HPLC-isolated MO subfractions could exhibit therapeutic effects in a cancer microenvironment by decreasing cancer cell viability and attenuating inflammatory cytokine production. Our results indicated that several of the subfractions significantly decreased the viability of HeLa and SiHa cervical cancer cells in a dose and time dependent manner. Additionally, these subfractions decreased macrophage secretion of the pro-inflammatory cytokines, interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha), in a lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced model of inflammation. Overall, these data indicate that compounds in MO may be explored as an alternative treatment option for some cancers and inflammatory disorders. Further studies will seek to identify the bioactive compounds in our subfractions using analytical chemistry techniques
