ABSTRACT
Gambogic acid (GA; m.f. C38H44O8; [α]20D-714.10 [c 0.17, CHCl3]; Figure 15.1), a “caged prenylated xanthone,” is the principal acidic component of the pigment gamboge, the dried resin of various Garcinia species including Garcinia morella and Garcinia hanburyi Hook.f (family: Clusiaceae). G. hanburyi mainly grows in South China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand (Yang et al. 1994) and is used as a folk medicine to treat infections and tumors (Asano et al. 1996; Han et al. 2006, 2009; Reutrakul et al. 2007; Tao et al. 2009). The xanthone molecule was isolated from G. hanburyi for the rst time in 1949 (Land and Katz 1949, Ren et al. 2011) and its planar structure was deduced through several chemical reactions and NMR spectroscopy in 1965 (Ollis et al. 1965) and also conrmed later on by X-ray diffraction analysis in the form of a pyridine salt (Weakley et al. 2001). The 1H and Carbon-13 Nuclear Magnetic Response (13CNMR) spectral data of the compound were
15.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 393 15.2 Anticancer Studies with Gambogic Acid: Pharmaceutical Potential and Mode of Action ..... 394 15.3 Semi-Synthetic Studies with Gambogic Acid: Comparative Anticancer Potential
and Structure-Activity Relationship ....................................................................................400 15.4 Gambogic Acid: Studies with Drug-Delivery Systems ........................................................406
