Danshen ( Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge) is one of the most used medicinal plants in the Oriental medicine and has been well studied for application in modern medicine. In our continuing study on chemical constituents of danshen cultivated in Vietnam, using chromatography separation resulted in the isolation of six phenolic compounds including a benzophenone, iriflophenone 2- O- α-L-rhamnopyranoside (1), and five phenolic acids including rosmarinic acid (2), rosmarinic acid methyl ester (3), rosmarinic acid ethyl ester (4), salvianolic acid A methyl ester (5) and salvianolic acid A ethyl ester (6) from the butanol portion of the danshen crude extract. Beside the typically main phenolic acid components, to our knowledge, iriflophenone 2- O- α-L-rhamnopyranoside (1) was first isolated from salvia sp. On biological testing, compound 1 showed strong antiproliferative activity on HL-60 leukemia cells with the IC50 of 8.9 μM; compounds 1 and 3–6 inhibited markedly nitric oxide production in lipopolysaccharide-treated RAW 264.7 cells.
Salvianolic acid A attenuates CCl4-induced liver fibrosis by regulating the PI3K/AKT/mTOR, Bcl-2/Bax and caspase-3/cleaved caspase-3 signaling pathways
