It’s been a long time since I’ve written a myeloma research post, but a recently published Korean abstract made my fingers itch to hit the keyboard. Here goes…

Remember ursolic acid? Well, perhaps not, since the last time I wrote about it was, oh, as long ago as 2007, the year I began blogging, in fact. What is ursolic acid? It’s a pentacyclic triterpenoid (yeah, I know, I know…) that can be found in a lot of foods, such as rosemary, apples, cranberries, pears, oregano, holy basil, thyme and prunes.

Back to the Korean abstract (the full study, from what I can gather, hasn’t been published yet), which I read about a half hour ago: it reports that the ursolic acid found in the root bark of Morus Alba, more commonly known as white mulberry, doesn’t just inhibit “the proliferation of RPMI-8226 multiple myeloma (MM) cells,” but it kills them, too. Oh yeah!

You can read the abstract here: https://www.jmb.or.kr/journal/view.html?doi=10.4014/jmb.2109.09002

Conclusion: “These findings suggest that MRBE and its active ingredient, ursolic acid, […] may have significant chemopreventive potential against MM.” Very exciting, don’t you think? Of course, we must remember that this is a study that used MM cells in a lab setting (not human patients, I mean), so, as always, we mustn’t get overly excited. But still, a wee bit of excitement can’t hurt, right? 🙂 

I have already ordered some white mulberry tea, while I do some more research to find a reliable source for ursolic acid (I hope to find the Morus Alba extract…but so far, I’ve found mainly rosemary extracts…). No idea if the tea will do any good, but at least it can’t hurt!

Fingers crossed…