Fabian T Kuranen, Charles O Nnadi , Matthias O Agbo

For correspondence:-  Charles Nnadi   Email: charles.nnadi@unn.edu.ng   Tel:+234-8064947734

Received: 18 September 2024        Accepted: 3 December 2024        Published: 30 December 2024

Citation: Kuranen FT, Nnadi CO, Agbo MO. Antiplasmodial and cytotoxic activities of Jussiaea linifolia G. Don extracts. Trop J Pharm Res 2024; 23(12):2043-2052 doi: 10.4314/tjpr.v23i12.9

© 2024 The authors.
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..

Abstract

Purpose: To evaluate the in vivo and in vitro antiplasmodial activity of Jussiaea linifolia extracts using validated models. Methods: Methanol extract was partitioned into n-hexane, ethyl acetate and n-butanol fractions and subjected to antiplasmodial and cytotoxic activity assays. The in vivo assay adopted Peter’s four-day suppressive and Ranes curative tests to estimate Plasmodium berghei NK47 growth suppression while the in vitro antiplasmodial activities were performed using chloroquine-sensitive Plasmodium falciparum NF54 and L6 mammalian myoblast to determine growth inhibition and cytotoxicity respectively. Results: Acute toxicity test showed that the methanol extract displayed LD50 > 5000 mg/kg. The in vitro assays revealed that the extract and ethyl acetate fraction elicited significantly higher IC50 of 1.15 µg/mL (L6 83.2 µg/mL) and 0.785 µg/mL (L6 > 100 µg/mL), respectively against P. falciparum compared with n-hexane (> 100 µg/mL; L6 5.89 µg/mL) and n-butanol (48.1 µg/mL; L6 12.84 µg/mL) fractions. In the in vivo suppressive model, 400 mg/kg of ethyl acetate soluble fraction elicited a 97.1 % (p < 0.05; mean survival time > 21 days) P. berghei suppression compared with untreated group. Also, the ethyl acetate soluble evoked the highest suppression of parasitemia (94.17 %) in the curative model when compared with untreated. The extract and fractions of J. linifolia were found to restore packed cell volume in infected mice to their respective baselines compared with continued decline in untreated group. Conclusion: The study validates the traditional use of J. linifolia as an antimalarial decoction in some rural communities and shows that the ethyl acetate soluble fraction of methanol extract could be a source of lead antiplasmodial compounds.