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The pharmacological variability of crude coal tar
Author(s) -
LOWE N.J.,
BREEDING J.,
WORTZMAN M.S.
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
british journal of dermatology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.304
H-Index - 179
eISSN - 1365-2133
pISSN - 0007-0963
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2133.1982.tb00391.x
Subject(s) - coal tar , tar (computing) , coal , chemistry , hairless , chromatography , pulp and paper industry , environmental science , food science , organic chemistry , biochemistry , computer science , engineering , programming language
SUMMARY Although crude coal tar is a mixture of approximately 10,000 components, few attempts have been made to assess the pharmacological activity of individual components of purified tar products or of different coal tars themselves. The hairless mouse epidermal DNA synthesis suppression assay, which has been shown to be useful for predicting the antiproliferative activity of topical agents, has recently been used to assess the activity of crude coal tar, coal tar extracts and tar based shampoos. Using this assay, great variation in effectiveness (0–90%) was found among tar distillate fractions, suggesting that one source of potential variation of activity in commercial coal tar products is the non‐standard composition of crude coal tar itself.