4mu supplement is an oral chemopreventive and therapeutic agent that reduces PCa progression and metastasis by abrogating HA signaling. It is a derivate of 7-hydroxycoumarin (umbelliferones) and has been consumed as a dietary supplement since the 1990s for liver health and gall bladder function. It has choleretic and antispasmodic properties, but it lacks the antisperminogenic and anti-aromatase activities of coumarin. It is also a fluorescent indicator and has been used in enzyme assays due to its HA-dependent fluorescence. In small clinical trials, 4MU showed choleretic and antispasmodic benefits as well as improvement in liver and gall bladder functions.
Understanding the Benefits of 4mu Supplement
The authors selected a model that mimics the development and progression of prostate cancer in mice to test the preventive and therapeutic potential of 4MU. They started the study with animals that have low-volume/low-risk disease and treated them with 4MU for 8 weeks, then a more aggressive model of prostate cancer (12 weeks), and finally an advanced model of disease that has high circulating levels of PSA (28 weeks). They observed that all three models were affected by 4MU treatment and that hepatic nodules were reduced in HBV-TG mice after 12 weeks of treatment.
Interestingly, they found that the doses used to treat the tumor models in mice correlated to human doses consumed as a dietary supplement. At these doses, the mice did not experience serum or organ toxicity and were able to maintain weights similar to vehicle-treated controls. In addition, they found that 4MU significantly decreased tumor growth and skeletal metastasis in the transgenic model. Moreover, it downregulated the expression of mRNAs for hepatocellular hyaluronan synthases HAS2 and HAS3 and hepatocellular hyaluronidases HYAL1 and HYAL2.