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WASHINGTON — Ginger can kill ovarian cancer cells while the compound that makes peppers hot can shrink pancreatic tumors, researchers told a conference Tuesday.

Their studies add to a growing body of evidence that at least some popular spices might slow or prevent the growth of cancer.

The study on ginger was done using cells in a lab dish, which is a long way from finding that it works in actual cancer patients, but it is the first step to testing the idea.

Dr. Rebecca Liu, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, and colleagues tested ginger powder dissolved in solution by putting it on cultures of ovarian cancer cells.

It killed the cancer cells in two ways — through a self-destruction process called apoptosis and through autophagy, in which cells digest themselves, the researchers told a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

"Most ovarian cancer patients develop recurrent disease that eventually becomes resistant to standard chemotherapy, which is associated with resistance to apoptosis," Liu said in a statement.

"If ginger can cause autophagic cell death in addition to apoptosis, it may circumvent resistance to conventional chemotherapy."

Ovarian cancer kills 16,000 out of the 22,000 U.S. women who are diagnosed with it every year, according to the American Cancer Society.

A second study found that capsaicin, which makes chili peppers hot, fed to mice caused apoptosis death in pancreatic cancer cells, said Sanjay Srivastava of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

"Capsaicin triggered the cancerous cells to die off and significantly reduced the size of the tumors," he said.