Apoptotic activity of manuka honey towards MCF-7 breast cancer cell lines / Siti Aisyah Su Azmi

Breast cancer is a type of cancers that most commonly occurred in women. Despite all the therapies available nowadays, alternative therapeutic measure such as natural products can be developed to fight against this deadly disease. Anti-cancer therapy by using honey which has antioxidant properties can be used to induce the apoptotic activity and causing morphological changes to the cell. In this experiment, apoptotic activity of MCF-7 breast cancer cell lines challenged with Manuka honey was studied. The content of phenolic and flavonoid in the honey which have antioxidant activity was quantified using total phenolic content and total flavonoid content test. The results showed that Manuka honey has 64.67g of GAE/Land 33.13 g of CEIL. Apoptotic features of treated MCF- 7 cells were examined under the transmission electron microscope. The image showed that treated cell exhibited signs of apoptosis including chromatin condensation, nuclear shrinkage, membrane blebbing, cytoplasmic shrinkage and cytoplasmic vacuoles.