Abstract

SOBRAL-SOUZA, Celestina E et al. Cytotoxic and antiparasitic in vitro activities of a-pinene and carvacrol . Acta toxicol. argent. [online]. 2014, vol.22, n.2, pp.76-81. ISSN 1851-3743.

Leishmaniasis and Chagas Disease represent a great challenge against the modern therapeutics. Due the high difficult to find new drugs with therapeutic efficacy and low toxicity, several natural products had been screened. Many species of plants were investigated about their leishmanicidal and trypanocidal activities. Some phytocompounds are the a-pinene and carvacrol. In this work, we evaluated the bioactivities of a-pinene and carvacrol against Trypanosoma cruzi and Leishmania braziliensis cell lines. The carvacrol inhibited 38,34% and 74,12% of the promatigote and epimastigote forms, respectively at 100 µg/mL, showing a low cytotoxic activity (21,62%). The O a-pinene inhibited 100% and 5,30% against the epimastigote and promastigote forms respectively, at 100 µg/mL, showing a higher cytotoxic activity (87,88%).

Keywords : Leishmanicidal activity; Trypanocidal activity; Cytotoxic activity; a-pinene.