Abstract
Despite recent advances in chemotherapy and surgical resection, the 5-year survival rate of esophageal cancer still remains at the low level. Therefore, it is very important to discover a new agent to improve the life expectancy of patients with esophageal cancer. Dihydroartemisinin (DHA), a semisynthetic derivative of artemisinin, has recently exhibited promising anticancer activity against various cancer cells. But so far, the specific mechanism remains unclear. We have previously demonstrated that DHA reduced viability of esophageal cancer cells in a dose-dependent manner in vitro and induced cell cycle arrest and apoptosis. Here, we extended our study to further observe the efficacy of DHA on esophageal cancer cells in vivo. In the present study, for the first time, we found that DHA significantly inhibits cell proliferation in xenografted tumor compared with the control. The mechanism was that DHA induced cell apoptosis in both human esophageal cancer cell lines Eca109 and Ec9706 in vivo in a dose-dependent manner. The results suggested that DHA was a promising agent against esophageal cancer in the clinical treatment.
Highlights
Esophageal cancer is currently the fourth most common cause of cancer death in China
We have demonstrated that DHA reduced the viability of esophageal cancer cells in a dose-dependent manner
We firstly report the antitumor effect of DHA on esophageal cancer in vivo
Summary
Esophageal cancer is currently the fourth most common cause of cancer death in China. The average death attains around 150 thousand people every year [1,2,3]. Despite recent advances in chemotherapy and surgical resection, the 5-year survival rate remains at the low level [4, 5]. The low survival rate might be due to the lack of early diagnosis, invasion and metastasis of the tumor, and over-reliant on confined drugs with some side effects and resistance, producing unsatisfactory results. Dihydroartemisinin (DHA), a front-line antimalarial herb compound, has shown promising anticancer activity in vitro and in vivo with low toxicity to normal cells [6]. DHA has suppressive effects on the invasion and metastasis of cancer cells [12]
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