Unlocking Aloe Vera's Healing Secrets

For thousands of years, humans have turned to a cactus-like plant that has mysterious abilities to heal wounds.

But aloe vera, a succulent that is actually a member of the lily family, has often been shunned by the scientific community because no one could figure out how this native of northern Africa could work its miracles.

Now, scientists are inching closer to understanding why the cooling liquid from the fat leaf of an aloe vera plant can make the hurt go away.

It doesn't take a pharmaceutical company to make it work. The plant does it all by itself, which is why the ancient Egyptians turned to it more than 3,500 years ago, and the ancient Greeks and others used it to heal wounds and even clear up constipation.

Gooey and Nutritious

The picture is still a bit murky, because every researcher who tackles the problem seems to come up with a different answer. Some say the gooey gel from inside the leaf reduces inflammation, thus helping the healing process, and there is substantial evidence that's at least part of the equation.

Others say it's because of the rich mixture of vitamins and minerals contained in the plant, which is actually about 96 percent water. Still others say aloe acts as a moisturizer, and wounds need moisture to heal.

"If you read the aloe literature there's a whole diversity of different biological activity that individual investigators have seen," says immunologist Ian Tizard of Texas A&M in College Station. "So you could make the case that every investigator has a favorite pathway."

No one doubts these days that it works, although it's not the cure-all that some people claim. But why it works is still under debate.

"We're trying to sweat out what the mechanisms are," Tizard says.

In his own research, Tizard has found something quite different about the aloe vera, and it sets it apart from all other plants. Plant cell walls are mainly cellulose, but they also have a complex carbohydrate called a "pectin" that forms a jelly when combined with acid and sugar. Pectin from citrus products is widely used in the food industry.

"It's what stops your strawberry jam from being runny," Tizard says.

But when Tizard and his colleagues examined the pectin found in aloe vera, they found it quite different from the pectin found in other plants.

"Its sugar content was somewhat different, and it was curious in that it formed solid gels with either calcium or with sodium" rather than just sugars, he says.

Cell Cement

But the real surprise came when they took the pure aloe pectin that they had isolated in their lab and applied it to small biopsy puncture wounds in rats and pigs. It made the wounds heal faster, Tizard says.

"So it's clearly one of the mechanisms [behind the healing power of aloe]," he says. "But there may be others."

This, he thinks, is what happens when aloe pectin is applied to a wound:

As a wound heals, the cells around it are stimulated to divide and grow into the wound. The stimulant is something called a growth factor, usually a vitamin that affects the growth of an organism. Most growth factors, however, degrade quickly, slowing the healing process.

But when the researchers added the aloe pectin, they found that it served as a binding agent, welding growth factors together and thus protecting them from degradation.

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