A novel area in modern day medicine termed as vermiceuticals include the production of pharmaceutically important compounds from earthworm extracts. Earthworm possess rich natural sources of antioxidants and are used with other herbs to treat a wide variety of conditions ranging from spasms and convulsions to pain relief, treatment of fever and certain types of arthritis. Focusing this, in our present study, the earthworm pastes prepared from three species of common earthworms were analyzed for invitro anticancer potential against three different cancer cell lines. MCF-7, PC-3 and HCT-116 cells were treated with earthworm pastes of Perionyx excavates, Eudilus eugeniae and Eisenia fetida and the effects on the cytotoxic nature of earthworm pastes of Perionyx excavates, Eudilus eugeniae and Eisenia fetida were determined using MTT cytotoxic assay. IC50 concentration was determined as the drug concentration that is required to reduce the half of the cells from the total population. From this analysis it was found that earthworm paste of Perionyx excavatus showed anticancer activity against all the three cancer cell lines used. It showed IC50 values of 87.45µg/ml, 104.8µg/ml and 239.1µg/ml in MCF-7, HCT-116 and PC 3 cells respectively. Eudilus eugeniae and Eisenia fetida also showed IC50 values of 320.9µg/ml, 321µg/ml and 14.18µg/ml, 25.95µg/ml in MCF-7 and HCT-116 cancer cells respectively but no activity against PC 3 cells. DNA ladder assays, clonogenic assays and cell cycle studies were also performed on PC3, MCF-7, HCT-116 cells by treating them with earthworm pastes of concentration- 320μg/ml, which showed results in a dose dependent manner and a maximum cell cycle arrest as 25.85 % , 27.88 %,30.03 % for P.excavatus, E. eugeniae and E. fetida at G2/M phase respectively and induced apoptosis. Further research on the principal active components of earthworm pastes of the three mentioned species leads to development of drug to treat human cancer.
