Abstract
Embelin is a naturally-occurring benzoquinone compound that has been shown to possess many biological properties relevant to human cancer prevention and treatment, and increasing evidence indicates that embelin may modulate various characteristic hallmarks of tumor cells. This review summarizes the information related to the various oncogenic pathways that mediate embelin-induced cell death in multiple cancer cells. The mechanisms of the action of embelin are numerous, and most of them induce apoptotic cell death that may be intrinsic or extrinsic, and modulate the NF-κB, p53, PI3K/AKT, and STAT3 signaling pathways. Embelin also induces autophagy in cancer cells; however, these autophagic cell-death mechanisms of embelin have been less reported than the apoptotic ones. Recently, several autophagy-inducing agents have been used in the treatment of different human cancers, although they require further exploration before being transferred from the bench to the clinic. Therefore, embelin could be used as a potential agent for cancer therapy.
Highlights
Embelin (2,5-dihydroxy-3-undecyl-1,4-benzoquinone) is a major active constituent obtained from the Embelia ribes Burm plant, and has been evaluated for treating a range of cancer types [1] (Figure 1)
Embelin induced apoptosis in human leukemia cells, which was mediated by the activation of caspase-dependent mechanisms that involved the down-regulation of XIAP [53]
These results clearly demonstrate that suppressing the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/AKT pathway and inhibiting XIAP results in more efficient apoptosis in diffuse, large B-cell lymphoma [54]
Summary
Embelin (2,5-dihydroxy-3-undecyl-1,4-benzoquinone) is a major active constituent obtained from the Embelia ribes Burm plant (its fruit), and has been evaluated for treating a range of cancer types [1] (Figure 1). Several studies have evaluated embelin’s role in anti-cancer combination therapy, of embelin is predominantly mediated by the modulation of various oncogenic transcription factors, highlighting the application of embelin in improving the efficacy of the treatment (Table 2). The anti-cancer activity of embelin is predominantly mediated by the modulation of and various oncogenic therapies are focused on investigating mechanisms associated with cell-growth cell-death transcription factors, inflammatory cytokines,of growth factors, and protein kinases pathways. Autophagy is a in tumorigenesis and highly therapy resistance [25,27,28,29].ofApoptotic pathways are, ,and legitimate catabolic process, conserved, of elimination proteins and cellular organelles, it includesfocus areas macroautophagy, for cancer therapy; predominantly natural agents like embelin can affect various microautophagy, and chaperone-mediated autophagy [30,31]. The induction of autophagic cell death and apoptosis as mechanisms of cancer prevention by embelin will be discussed
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