Colchicine is a tricyclic alkaloid with anti-inflammatory properties extracted from the herbaceous Colchicum autumnale plant and first isolated and synthesized in the 19th century [1]. It is one of very few drugs surviving from antiquity to modernity, since it was described in a 1550 BC Egyptian papyrus and used by ancient Greek, Byzantine, and Arabian physicians. Historically, colchicine has been used in gout, and since the discovery in the 1970’, for preventing attacks of the hereditary auto-inflammatory disease familial Mediterranean fever (FMF) and its most dreaded complication -AA amyloidosis [2,3].
