A new semisynthetic 1-O-acetyl-6-O-lauroylbritannilactone induces apoptosis of human laryngocarcinoma cells through p53-dependent pathway

Abstract

Initiation of apoptosis is an important event for chemoprevention and chemotherapy of cancer. Naturally derived products had drawn growing attention as lead compounds for anticancer drug discovery. ABL-L, a semisynthetic analogue of natural sesquiterpenoid 1-O-acetylbritannilactone (ABL) isolated from Inula britannica, showed stronger suppression against three solid tumor cell lines with 4–10 fold improvement than ABL. However, its molecular mechanism of cell death induction has still not been determined. The present study evaluated the anticancer efficacy of ABL-L and its biological activities mechanism on human laryngocarcinoma cells HEp-2 in vitro. We found that ABL-L-induced inhibition of cell proliferation was associated with an increase in G1-phase arrest. Typical apoptotic morphological and biochemical features were also observed in treated cells. Furthermore, the levels of the anti-apoptotic Bcl-2, pro-caspase 3/8/9 and poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase PARP decreased, and the level of pro-apoptotic Bax increased. Involvement of the caspase-mediated apoptosis was confirmed using caspase inhibitor Z-VAD-FMK pretreatment. In addition, ABL-L induced a tumor suppressor p53 and its target genes expression p21, fas, noxa and puma. The results of p53 knockdown suggest that caspase-mediated apoptosis induced by ABL-L was in p53-dependent pathway on HEp-2 cells. Our data indicate that the cytotoxicity of the novel semisynthetic analogue ABL-L involved G1 cell cycle arrest and apoptosis via a p53-dependent, caspase-mediated pathway on human laryngocarcinoma cells.