Evodiamine inhibits human thyroid cancer cells in vitro and in vivo

Abstract

Introduction: Thyroid cancer is the most prevalent cancer among endocrine malignancies. In clinically, surgical resection combined with radioactive iodine therapy has been proved effective in treating differentiated thyroid cancer, including papillary and follicular thyroid cancers (FTC). However, patients with incurable differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC), poorly differentiated thyroid cancer (PDTC) and anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) exhibit worse prognosis. Therefore, a novel and effective treatment is urgently needed to deal with the current treatment. Evodiamine is one of the important components isolated from Chinese herb Wu-Chu-Yu, and has been demonstrated to contribute on anti-inflammatory effects, anti-angiogenesis, anti-tumor growth, anti-invasive and metastatic activities, and up-regulating apoptosis. In the present study, we examined the effects of evodiamine in FTC, PDTC and ATC cells, respectively. Evodiamine inhibited cellular proliferation and the colonies formation of FTC, PDTC and ATC cells. Cell cycle arrest at G2/M phase was found in all of the cells during evodiamine treatment. Moreover, caspase-dependent apoptosis in these cells was also revealed under evodiamine treatment. In addition, autophagy induction was also found in evodiamine treated human thyroid cancer cells. Finally, we verified the effects of evodiamine on anti-human thyroid cancers in a xenograft nude mice model. Our results demonstrate that evodiamine induces cell cycle arrest, caspase-dependent apoptosis and autophagy leading to inhibit proliferation of multiple types of human thyroid cancer cells. We suggest that evodiamine could be a chemo-therapeutic candidate for human thyroid cancers.