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Evaluation of piperlongumine as an
anti-cancer drug in oral cancer
Speaker : Geng-Hung Liu
Advisor : Hau-Ren Chen
Date: 2012.5.18
Abstract
Oral cancer is one of the most prevalence cancers and is listed as the
6th leading cancer worldwide. In South and Southeast Asia regions, oral
cancer was the third leading cancer among all cancers. In Taiwan and
India, betel nut is the major risk factor for oral cancer. Unfortunately,
there is no proper auxiliary drug for chemotherapy effectively so far.
Piperlongumine (PL) is a natural product of the Long pepper (Piper
longum), which is a pepper plant found in southern India and Southeast
Asia. Recent study discovers that PL is a novel compound and blocks the
response to oxidative stress selectively in cancer cells, but spares in
normal cells, suggesting that this small molecule probably has the
potential to be an anticancer drug in the future.
In this study, I first treated two oral squamous cancer cell lines (OC2
and OCSL) with PL and found that PL could suppress the growth of oral
cancer cells from MTT assay. To investigate the possible mechanisms for
the suppression of cell growth, experiments were performed to examine
cell cycle arrest, apoptosis, senescence and autophagy. From preliminary
results, I found that PL might induce cell cycle arrest at G0/G1 phase and
also cause apoptosis from cytometry analysis by PI single staining or
Annexin V/PI double staining, respectively. In addition, protein level of
PARP increased in a time-dependent manner after treatment with 20 μM
PL. Moreover, OC2 induced senescence significantly in comparison with
OCSL after 24 hour treatment. However, the autophagy marker LC3 could
not be activated after PL treatment by western blots analysis.
In the future, I will test the effect of anti-oral cancer drugs, by
co-treatment 5-Fu/cisplantin and PL to investigate whether the
combined treatments has the synergistic effect on growth suppression in
both oral cancer cell lines.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Evaluation of Piperlongumine as an anti-cancer drug in oral cancer
Speaker: Geng-Hung Liu
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