Evaluation of Thrombolytic and Cytotoxic activities of an Ornamental medicinal plant: Byttneria pilosa

Abstract

Purpose: The rapidly growing incidence of ischemic stroke caused by thrombosis of the arterial vessels is one of the major factors of death in the present world. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the chosen herbal preparations possess thrombolytic activity or not and aimed to find out its toxicity. Methods: An in vitro thrombolytic model was used to check the clot lysis effect of the crude extract of B. pilosa, streptokinase was used as a positive control and water as a negative control. In another part, we used Brine shrimp lethality bioassay method to measure the cytotoxic potency of the plant extract. Results: In the in vitro thrombolytic model, methanolic extract of B. pilosa showed significant (p <0.002) clot lysis activity with 46.20 ± 2.274% when compared with positive control Streptokinase (82.60 ± 2.45%) and negative control distilled water (11.29 ± 0.677%). Other part of our study showed moderate or little bit low activity with LC50 of 216.7µg/ml. Conclusions: Our study suggests that thrombolytic activity of B. pilosa could be considered as very promising and beneficial for the Bangladeshi traditional medicine. Lower effects in cytotoxic activity finding may be due to insufficient quantities of toxic metabolite or antitumor component in the extract. In vivo clot dissolving property and active components of the extract for clot lysis could lead the plants for their therapeutic uses. However, further work will establish whether, the phytochemicals from this plant could be incorporated as a thrombolytic agent for the improvement of the patients suffering from diseases like atherosclerosis or embolism.