Antiproliferative and Antioxidant Activities of Two Extracts of the Plant Species Euphorbia dendroides L

Background: These days, the desire for naturally occurring antioxidants has significantly increased, especially for use in foodstuffs, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical products, to replace synthetic antioxidants that are regularly constrained due to their carcinogenicity. Methods: The study in hand aimed to appraise the antioxidant effect of two Euphorbia dendroides extracts using reducing power, anti-peroxidation, and DPPH (1,1 Diphenyl 2 Pycril Hydrazil) scavenging essays, in addition to the anticancer activity against two tumor cell lines, namely C6 (rat brain tumor)cells, and Hela (human uterus carcinoma)cell lines. Results: The results indicated that the ethyl acetate extract exhibited antiradical activity of 29.49%, higher than that of n-butanol extract (18.06%) at 100 µg/mL but much lower than that of gallic acid (78.21%).The ethyl acetate extract exhibits better reducing capacity and lipid peroxidation inhibitory activity compared to n-butanol extract but less than all tested standards. Moreover, the ethyl acetate extract was found to have an antiproliferative activity of more than 5-FU (5-fluoro-Uracil) against C6 cells at 250 µg/mL with IC₅₀ and IC₇₅ of 113.97, 119.49 µg/mL, respectively, and good cytotoxic activity against the Hela cell lines at the same concentration. The HPLC-TOF-MS (high performance liquid chromatography-Time-of-flight-Mass Spectrometry) analyses exposed the presence of various compounds, among which Gallic and Chlorogenic acids functioned as major compounds. Conclusions: The two extracts exhibited moderate anticancer abilities and behaved somewhat as average antioxidant agents. Based on the total phenolics and flavonoids contents, as well as HPLC results, it could be concluded that antiproliferative and antioxidant activities depend upon the content of different phenolics and flavonoids.