A newly found technique promises to harvest guava’s scientifically-proven powers agaisnt liver cancer

Over the years, science has amassed troves of research data backing up guava’s particular benefits in the fight against liver cancer. 

Unfortunately, the lack of access and availability of the fruit hindered efforts to harvest the naturally occurring molecule in guava. This, in turn, prevented the industry from easily producing treatments that would benefit an ever-growing patient population. 

A recent study published in Angewandte Chemie might be the first toward solving this problem.  Using a method called natural product total synthesis, a team of researchers led by William Chain, associate professor in the University of Delaware's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, invented a process to produce guava’s cancer-fighting molecules in a lab using widely available chemicals. 

“Now chemists will be able to take our manuscripts and basically follow our 'recipe' and they can make it themselves," Chain said to ScienceDaily.

According to the outlet, the method stands out for being low-cost and easy to use. This opens the door to the mass production of the molecules responsible for guava’s reputation as an anti-cancer food. 

This could eventually result in more affordable, more widely available cancer treatments, benefitting the nearly 900 thousand people around the world diagnosed with liver cancer every year. 

The breakthrough could also result in more effective drugs to treat the ailment, which in the US has a 5-year survival rate of only 15 percent. 

An industry-wide effort 

In an interview with the science news website, Liam O'Grady, doctoral candidate in Chain's lab and the article’s principal investigator, explained that this is only the first step towards a bigger solution that might improve liver cancer outcomes in the world. 

"We are the first ones to pave that road, and other people can repave it any which way. Find the shortcuts if they have to. But since we entered into that unknown territory, I think we helped shed light on this unknown pathway that can get us there. And I think that's the cool part," he said.

As with every scientific breakthrough, more research is needed to improve the technology and adapt its eventual applicability to the mass production of liver cancer treatments.

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