Green tea’s popularity has grown quickly in recent years.Green tea is a product made from the Camellia sinensis plant. It can be prepared as a beverage, which can have some health effects.The useful parts of green tea are the leaf bud, leaf, and stem. Its fans can drink it, enjoy its flavor in their ice cream and slather it on their skin with lotions infused with it. Now, the tea could have a new, unexpected role — to improve the image quality of MRIs.An Indian-origin scientist Sanjay Mathur in Germany has discovered a new, unexpected role for green tea.
Sanjay Mathur is the Director of the Institute of Inorganic and Materials Chemistry at the University of Cologne with research interest in chemical nanotechnologies with thrust on molecular routes to functional nanostructures for diversified applications ranging from biocompatible materials, nanotoxicology studies, engineered surfaces and new materials and devices for energy applications.
Scientists report in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces that they successfully used compounds from green tea to help image cancer tumors in mice.
Sanjay Mathur and colleagues note that recent research has revealed the potential usefulness of nanoparticles — iron oxide in particular — to make biomedical imaging better. Mathur’s team wanted to see if compounds from green tea, which research suggests has anticancer and anti-inflammatory properties, could play this role.
Using a simple, one-step process, the researchers coated iron-oxide nanoparticles with green-tea compounds called catechins and administered them to mice with cancer. MRIs demonstrated that the novel imaging agents gathered in tumor cells and showed a strong contrast from surrounding non-tumor cells. The researchers conclude that the catechin-coated nanoparticles are promising candidates for use in MRIs and related applications.
The authors acknowledge funding from the University of Cologne and the EU Project Nanommune.
