Morellic acid has anti-cancer activity, it strongly inhibited the migration of HUVEC at a low concentration of 0.5 μM in HUVEC cell migration assay in vitro. Morellic acid also has antiangiogenic activity.

An improved HPLC method was developed to simultaneously quantify 12 caged xanthones, including three pairs of epimers and four pairs of trans-cis isomers, i.e. forbesione, isoMorellic acid, Morellic acid, R-30-hydroxygambogic acid, S-30-hydroxygambogic acid, isogambogenic acid, gambogenic acid, gambogellic acid, R-isogambogic acid, S-isogambogic acid, R-gambogic acid and S-gambogic acid. This method was validated to be sensitive, precise and accurate with limits of detection of 0.03-0.08 microg/mL, overall intra-day and inter-day variations less than 7.9% and overall recovery over 93.2%. The correlation coefficients (r(2)) of the calibration curves were higher than 0.995 for all analytes. The newly established method was successfully applied to reveal the difference in the chemical profiles and contents of these analytes in gamboges from different origins.