Ginger root kill ovarian cancer cells

Obstetrician J. Rebecca Liu of the University of Michigan and her colleagues reported that ginger powder, roughly the same as that sold in supermarkets, killed ovarian cancer cells in vitro both by triggering apoptosis and inducing them to cannibalize themselves, a phenomenon known as autophagy. "Most ovarian cancer patients develop recurrent disease that eventually becomes resistant to standard chemotherapy, which is associated with resistance to apoptosis," Liu explains. "If ginger can cause autophagic death in addition to apoptosis, it may circumvent that resistance." "Patients are using natural products either in place of or in conjunction with chemotherapy and we don't know if they work or how they work," Liu adds. "There's no good clinical data." To that end, these new findings may well be seeds of change.
However, the study on ginger was done using cells in a lab dish, which is a long way from finding that it works in actual cancer patients, but it is the first step to testing the idea. Ovarian cancer kills 16,000 out of the 22,000 U.S. women who are diagnosed with it every year.