Bee Venom and its Potential to Treat Cancer

Abstract

Background: Bee venom therapy (BVT) is a biotoxin, using bee products like honey, pollen, and bee venom to prevent or cure illness and enhance healing. It also helps to treat many diseases like arthritis, back pain, skin diseases, multiple sclerosis and recently have been found to have anticancer activities in treating tumors, including liver, lung, kidney, prostate, bladder, mammary cancer cells and leukemia cells.are Objectives: The aim of this report is to figure the major components, potential mechanisms and side effect of BVT in treating cancer cells. Results: BVT significantly inhibited proliferation MDA-MB-231 cells in which the targets of BV peptides are melittin and phospholipase A2 (PLA2). bee venom caused concentration-dependent growth inhibition in K1735M2 cells, moreover, bee venom inhibited primary tumor growth of B16 melanoma cells on the 6 mice after intraperitoneal injection. Conclusion: BVT against cancer have shown significant efficacy of inducing apoptosis, necrosis, mitochondrial disruption blocking of angiogenesis, cell cycle arrest and inhibition of cancer cell metastasis and invasion. Although, bee venom has a lot of therapeutic benefits, however, as any treatment it has many side effects such as local itching, swelling and anaphylactic shock so it must be used with a great caution.