Antineoplastic action mechanism of bioactive compounds and strategical molecular targets for inducting tumoral cells death

Author(s)

Ana Carolina Santos de Souza

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Biologia
• Defense date: 2007-02-00

Examining board members

Carmen Veríssima Ferreira; Alexandre Donizeti Martins Cavagis; José Andrés Yunes; José Barreto Campello Carvalheira; Maikel Petrus Peppelenbosch

• Advisor: Carmen Veríssima Ferreira; Hiroshi Aoyama

Abstract

Natural products have been providing numerous clinically used medicines and remain as essential components in the search for new drugs against various pharmacological targets including cancer, HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer¿s, malaria, and pain. Drug discovery from natural products, especially from medicinal plants, has played an important role in the chemoprevention and treatment of cancer and, off all available anticancer drugs between 1940 and 2002, about 40% were natural products per se or natural product-derived, with another 8% considered natural product mimics. In the present work, the plant flavonoid fisetin and the vitamin riboflavin are evaluated as potential anticancer agents. For this purpose, the leukemic cell line HL60 and the human prostate cancer cell PC3 were treated for 24h with irradiated riboflavin or fisetin and their effects on signal transduction pathways related to the cell survival and proliferation were evaluated. The results obtained demonstrated that riboflavin and fisetin have strong anti-proliferative activity, inducing tumoral cell death at µM concentrations. The investigation of the molecular death mechanism triggered by riboflavin demonstrated that the treatment of HL60 and PC3 with the irradiated vitamin induces apoptotic cell death through induction of the extrinsic pathway mediated by the activation of Fas/FasL system via a ceramide-dependent pathway. As a consequence of the activation of the death receptor Fas, an orderly sequence of signaling events leads to the modulation of signaling cascades through alterations in the activity/expression of key targets molecules related to proliferation, survival, migration and cell death. As well as riboflavin, fisetin also showed strong apoptotic activity, inducing HL60 cell death through modulation of protein kinase and phosphatase signaling cascades, leading to alterations in the NF?B expression, MAPKs activities, phosphoprotein levels and also inhibition of enzymes involved in the redox status maintenance. The results obtained in this work bring out information about the biologic activity of some molecules involved in the survival and death of leukemic and prostate cancer cells, indicating among then potential targets for the development of rational therapeutic strategies. Moreover, the data obtained demonstrated that irradiated riboflavin and fisetin have potential proapoptotic activity, pointing out these bioactive compounds as promising antitumoral agents, since they can affect important molecular targets related to proliferation, resistance and invasibility of cancer cells (AU)