Green tea and this cancer medicine may not mix
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Green tea may seem an elixir of good health, what with its vaunted antioxidants and polyphenols and whatnot. But if you’re taking a relatively new cancer drug called bortezomib -- marketed commercially as Velcade -- for multiple myeloma, mantle cell lymphoma or the brain cancer glioblastoma, drinking green tea could be a very bad idea.
A new study by pharmacologists and physicians at the University of Southern California found that, in animals as well as in the test tube, certain constituents of green tea blocked the effects of bortezomib -- notably, the drug’s ability to induce tumor cells to die off. Bortezomib, or Velcade, is a boronic acid proteasome inhibitor. It was first approved by the FDA in 2003 as a last-ditch drug for myeloma patients, but is now recognized as a first-line drug against mantle cell lymphoma and multiple myeloma.
The USC study found that green tea appears to interfere only with boronic-acid proteasome inhibitors such as Velcade, but not with non-boronic proteasome inhibitors, including the drug nelfinavir, a medicine for use in HIV/AIDS patients.
The finding that green tea’s constituents had a ‘pronounced antagonistic function’ when combined with the cancer drug was a major surprise. Researchers -- responding to optimism in the cancer research and patient communities over the curative potential of green tea -- set out to investigate whether the combination of green tea and bortezomib would yield ‘increased antitumor efficacy’ over bortezomib alone. Instead they found that green tea’s polyphenols ‘have the potential to negate the therapeutic efficacy’ of bortezomib against cancerous cell lines that give rise to glioblastoma and multiple myeloma.
-- Melissa Healy
