Abstract
Bioactive constituents of numerous marine organisms have been investigated recently for their preclinical and clinical anticancer activity. Three marine organisms: black-spotted sea cucumber: Pearsonothuria graeffei (Pg), lollyfish: Holothuria atra (Ha), and sea hare: Aplysia dactylomela (Ad), were collected during winter 2019 from Gulf of Aqaba, Red Sea, Egypt, and macerated with ethanol into three different extracts: PgE, HaE, and AdE, where each was in vitro assessed for its antiproliferative and proapoptotic properties on HepG2, HCT-116, and MCF-7 cancer cells. PgE dose-dependently inhibited the growth of HepG2, HCT-116, and MCF-7 cells within IC50 values 16.22, 13.34, and 18.09 μg/mL, respectively, while the IC50 values for the antiproliferative activity of HaE were 12.48, 10.45, and 10.36 μg/mL, respectively, and the IC50 values of AdE were 6.51, 5.33, and 6.87 μg/mL, respectively. All extracts were found to induce G0/G1 cell cycle arrest for HepG2 cells side by side with their inhibition of CDK2 on all three cell lines while all extracts were also showed to induce apoptosis in HepG2 cell line at pre-G1 phase supplemented by their anticancer activity via proapoptotic protein Bax, caspase-3, and cleavage PARP increase, and antiapoptotic protein Bcl-2 downturn. Moreover, necrosis has been relatively noticed in HepG2 cell line as an additional anticancer activity for each extract. Our data introduced three ethanolic marine extracts as natural chemotherapeutic agents to be further developed for cancer control.
Highlights
Cancer remains the second causative agent of deaths worldwide [1, 2]
HepG2 cell accumulation was noticed at the G0/G1 phase; the percentages were 57.59, 61.12, and 62.18% upon treating cells with PgE, HaE, and AdE, respectively
HepG2, HCT-116, and MCF-7 cancer cell lines each were exposed to PgE and HaE individual treatments such as S180 [35,36,37], SK-MEL-2 [34], and hepatoma 22 cells [35, 36] that each has been subjected to prior bioactive compounds of different previously investigated sea cucumbers
Summary
Cancer remains the second causative agent of deaths worldwide [1, 2]. There are more than 10 million new cancer patients with over 6 million correlated deaths accounting for roughly 12% of worldwide mortality [3]. There is an urgent need to determine the way of treatment of this ailment where the current strategy in treatment are mainly radiation-based therapy and chemotherapy [4]. This strategy is associated with toxic effects such as causing hair loss and other serious adverse effects [5]. Natural products have been studied in a variety of models of cancer where the results have been extremely promising [4]
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