Abstract
Glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive brain tumor with low survival rate, is difficult to be cured by neurosurgery or radiotherapy. Mounting evidence has reported the anti-inflammatory and anticancer effects of curcumin on several types of cancer in preclinical studies and clinical trials. To our knowledge, there is no platform or system that could be used to effectively and real-timely evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of curcumin for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). In this study, we constructed a lentivirus vector with triple-reporter genes (Fluc/GFP/tk) and transduced into rat F98 glioblastoma cells to establish an orthotopic F98/FGT glioma-bearing rat model. In the model, the therapeutic efficacies for curcumin alone, radiation alone, and their combination were evaluated via noninvasive bioluminescent imaging and overall survival measurements. At the cell level, curcumin is capable of causing a G2/M cell cycle arrest and sensitizing the F98 cells to radiation. In animal model, curcumin synergistically enhances the effects of radiotherapy on suppressing the growth of both transplanted glioma cells and in situ brain tumors, and extending the overall survival periods longer than those of curcumin alone and radiation alone treatments. In conclusion, we have demonstrated that curcumin may serve as a novel radiosensitizer to combine with radiotherapy using the triple-reporter F98/FGT animal model for effective and simultaneous evaluation of therapeutic efficacy.
Highlights
Glioblastoma or glioblastoma multiform (GBM) is the most frequent, aggressive, and high-grade primary tumor in the central nervous system that occurs in the brain
The criteria of causing no or least damage to the normal brain cells and conquering the difficulty of passing blood–brain barrier urged the clinical and translational scientists to figure out potential radiosensitizers, which should be examined in preclinical animal models, especially those noninvasive and dynamically trackable ones
The rapid developments of medical imaging technologies greatly help scientists to establish glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) animal models that can sensitively detect the expression of reporter genes
Summary
Glioblastoma or glioblastoma multiform (GBM) is the most frequent, aggressive, and high-grade (grade IV) primary tumor in the central nervous system that occurs in the brain. In spite of those remarkable progressions in neurosurgery, drug developments (gene-targeted therapy, stem-cell-based therapy, immuno-therapy, nanotechnology-based therapy), and advanced radiation technology have been made in the recent decades, the treatment outcomes of various types of cancer, including GBM, are still an important concern and far from satisfied [1,2,3,4,5]. Since the survival outcomes are so far from satisfaction, the clinical and translational scientists are searching for more practicable combinations of chemotherapy or chemoradiotherapy for GBM [9]
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