Potential of Curcumin in Skin Disorders

Abstract

Curcumin is a compound isolated from turmeric, a plant known for its medicinal use. Recently, there is a growing interest in the medical community in identifying novel, low-cost, safe molecules that may be used in the treatment of inflammatory and neoplastic diseases. An increasing amount of evidence suggests that curcumin may represent an effective agent in the treatment of several skin conditions. We examined the most relevant in vitro and in vivo studies published to date regarding the use of curcumin in inflammatory, neoplastic, and infectious skin diseases, providing information on its bioavailability and safety profile. Moreover, we performed a computational analysis about curcumin's interaction towards the major enzymatic targets identified in the literature. Our results suggest that curcumin may represent a low-cost, well-tolerated, effective agent in the treatment of skin diseases. However, bypass of limitations of its in vivo use (low oral bioavailability, metabolism) is essential in order to conduct larger clinical trials that could confirm these observations. The possible use of curcumin in combination with traditional drugs and the formulations of novel delivery systems represent a very promising field for future applicative research.

Keywords: antioxidants; atopic dermatitis; curcumin; iatrogenic dermatitis; inflammaging; inflammatory skin diseases; molecular docking; psoriasis; skin aging; skin cancer; skin infections; wound care.

Figure 1

Graphical abstract.

Figure 2

Inflammatory status imbalance leading to inflammaging.

Figure 3

Stick representation of the keto form of the curcumin molecule. The red, grey, and white colors indicate the oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen atoms, respectively. A black circle indicates the center of the symmetric molecule, while the 4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl, present in each of the two compound halves, is enclosed by a dotted line. This image was generated using the program PyMOL (The PyMOL Molecular Graphics System, Version 2.0 Schrödinger, LLC, New York, NY, USA).

Figure 4

Schematic view of the best molecular docking complexes between curcumin and (A) PDE1 (4NPW), (B) AKT (6HHF), (C) PKCΘ (5F9E), (D) PhK (2Y7J), (E) COX-2 (5F1A), and (F) PI3K (4WAF). The residues interacting through hydrogen bonds (green dashed lines) are shown in ball-and-stick, while the residues in contact with the ligand are indicated by circle sections with rays. This was produced using the LigPlot+ software (Laskowski R.A., Swindells M.B. LigPlot+: multiple ligand-protein interaction diagrams for drug discovery. (2011) J. Chem. Inf. Model. 51, 2778–2786.).

Figure 5

Molecular view of best docking complexes between curcumin and (A) PDE1 (4NPW), (B) AKT (6HHF), (C) PKCΘ (5F9E), (D) PhK (2Y7J), (E) COX-2 (5F1A), and (F) PI3K (4WAF). The β-strands are represented by blue arrows, while the α-helices and the loops are shown as red spirals and light grey wires, respectively. The curcumin, hosted in the active site, is indicated by stick model colored by atom type. This picture was generated using the program Chimera (Pettersen E.F., Goddard T.D., Huang C.C., Couch G. S., Greenblatt D.M., Meng E.C. and Ferrin T.E. (2004) UCSF Chimera—A visualization system for exploratory research and analysis. J. Comput. Chem. 25, 1605–1612.).