Abstract
Chemotherapy is used as a primary approach in cancer treatment after routine surgery. However, chemo-resistance tends to occur when chemotherapy is used clinically, resulting in poor prognosis and recurrence. Currently, Chinese medicine may provide insight into the design of new therapies to overcome chemo-resistance. Furanodiene, as a heat-sensitive sesquiterpene, is isolated from the essential oil of Rhizoma Curcumae. Even though mounting evidence claiming that furanodiene possesses anti-cancer activities in various types of cancers, the underlying mechanisms against chemo-resistant cancer are not fully clear. Our study found that furanodiene could display anti-cancer effects by inhibiting cell viability, inducing cell cytotoxicity, and suppressing cell proliferation in doxorubicin-resistant MCF-7 breast cancer cells. Furthermore, furanodiene preferentially causes apoptosis by interfering with intrinsic/extrinsic-dependent and NF-κB-independent pathways in doxorubicin-resistant MCF-7 cells. These observations also prompt that furanodiene may be developed as a promising natural product for multidrug-resistant cancer therapy in the future.
Highlights
Multidrug resistance (MDR) is one of the major factors of chemotherapy failure in the clinic, since it predicts poor prognosis and cancer recurrence of patients
In colony formation assay, colony formation was strongly inhibited by furanodiene (100 μM) treatment, and there were almost no alterations observed in doxorubicin (2 μM) treatment compared with vehicle control in MCF-7/DOXR cells (Figure 1C)
Our results show that furanodiene preferentially causes cancer cell death through inducing cell apoptosis via extrinsic- and intrinsic-dependent pathways and NF-κB-independent pathway in doxorubicin-resistant breast cancer cells (Figure 10)
Summary
Multidrug resistance (MDR) is one of the major factors of chemotherapy failure in the clinic, since it predicts poor prognosis and cancer recurrence of patients. A MDR phenotype is defined as the resistance of malignant cells to different drugs with diverse structures and functions after exposure to the drug (Biedler and Riehm, 1970; Kaye, 1988; Vtorushin et al, 2014; Wu et al, 2014). Since a significant proportion of multidrug-resistant cancer cells could survive even after chemotherapy that results in chemo-resistance, disease progression, and recurrence. Additional researchers have elucidated that cell death was induced by furanodiene in HepG2 cells (Xiao et al, 2007), HL60 leukemia cells (Ma et al, 2008), 95-D lung cancer cells (Xu et al, 2014), and uterine cervical cancer cells (Sun et al, 2009)
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