Ethanol extract of male Carica papaya flowers demonstrated non-toxic against MCF-7, HEP-G2, HELA, NCI-H460 cancer cell lines

Abstract

Previous studies showed that some extracts of Carica papaya L. could inhibit various cancer cell lines. In this study, from the flowers and petioles of male Carica papaya L. we report the isolation and structural elucidation of six known compounds including stigmast-4-ene-3-one (1), β-sitosterol 3-O-β-D-glucopyranoside (2), 3-O-(6-O-tetradecanoyl-β-D-glucopyranosyl)-β-sitosterol (3), benzyl β-D-glucopyranoside (4), uracil (5) and palmitic acid (6). Among them, compounds 1, 3, 5 were isolated from C. papaya for the first time. The ethanol extracts of leave, flower and root of male and female papaya and compounds 1, 4, 5 were tested for the inhibition of four cancer cell lines including MCF-7, Hep-G2, HeLa, NCI-H460 and all of them were inactive.