Foxgloves, one of the poisonous flowering plant known for its distinctive tower bell shaped flowers pink in summer, can be used to stop the spread of breast cancer. Scientists at John Hopkins University have discovered that the drug is based from a flowering plant foxglove, can dramatically slow the migration of malignant cancer cells to other parts of the body.

But the latest discovery, by a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, United States, suggesting that the drug easily and cheaply can also be produced from foxglove flowers for use in the fight against cancer. Earlier this year, the same team has found that digoxin can reduce the spread of prostate cancer in men, with the percentage of approximately 24 percent. Known, Foxglove is one of the first plants to be used for pharmaceutical drug development.

Quoted from mail online, in the year 1785, Dr. William Withering see remarkable improvement in patients with congestive heart failure after their use of traditional herbal medicines made ​​from plants.

Withering identified that the active ingredient is a substance called digitalis, and wrote about these findings more than 200 years ago in a book titled ‘A note from the foxglove and some medical use’.

Giant drug companies like GlaxoSmithKline finally transform it into a material called Digoxin tablets, and is used for heart failure and atrial fibrillation, a condition where the heart rhythm becomes abnormal. But researchers warn it has not provided evidence that digoxin is responsible for these benefits and warned that the drug can have side effects such as nausea, headache and breast enlargement in men, given to healthy people to prevent tumors.

To see how HIF-1 protein to react when exposed to digoxin, researchers transplanting human breast cancer cells in mice and two weeks later, gave them daily injections of Digoxin and Saline injections in two groups of mice.

Results showed that rats given digoxin had fewer cancer cells that spread to the lungs (one of the locations where migrating breast tumors) and tumors that have spread is smaller than the group given saline.

This finding could be something very meaningful, because the team found evidence that the cancer cells began to spread from the breast to the lungs much earlier than previously thought. Dr. Caitlin Palframan, from Breakthrough Breast Cancer, emphasizing research is still in its early stages and clinical trials are needed to see whether the drug can slow the growth and spread of breast cancer in humans.