Resveratrol: a candidate nutritional substance for prostate cancer prevention

The dietary stilbene resveratrol is a major constituent of a variety of edible plant products, including grapes and peanuts. Resveratrol has been identified as an excellent candidate cancer chemopreventive, based on its safety and efficacy in animal models of carcinogenesis. Resveratrol is a prototype of a plethora of bioactive polyphenols in the food supply that has just begun to be mined for cancer preventive agents. For example, polyphenolic grapeseed fractions were shown recently to potently antagonize chemical carcinogenesis. Taking into consideration that the identification of resveratrol as a cancer preventive agent is largely owed to its high abundance in nature (e.g., it accounts for 5-10% of the grapeskin biomass), it is logical to expect that naturally occurring stilbenes that are superior to resveratrol in their cancer preventive properties await identification. Thus, resveratrol may represent the tip of the iceberg of a broad class of stilbene and related polyphenolic natural products that include safe and highly effective agents for cancer prevention. We hypothesize that resveratrol may be especially suitable as a lead agent for prostate cancer prevention given its ability to: 1) inhibit each stage of multistage carcinogenesis, 2) scavenge incipient populations of androgen-dependent prostate cancer cells through androgen receptor antagonism, and 3) scavenge incipient populations of androgen-independent prostate cancer cells by short-circuiting the epidermal growth factor-receptor (EGFR)-dependent autocrine loops in the cancer cells.