Studies On The Interaction Of Anticancer Drug Mitoxantrone And Elemene With DNA And Lung Cancer Cells By Raman Spectroscopy

Cancer is serious to threatening the people's health and life, and early diagnosis is crucial to effective treatment of the cancer patients and to higher survival rates. However, unobvious symptom of the early patients often results in an erroneous diagnosis, and so it is imperative to develop new techniques to diagnose various cancers at early stage. For treatment of the cancer patients, chemotherapy is still the standard treatment method, however only modest increase in survival rate can be achieved and thus it causes patients much pain. Since current treatment modalities are inadequate, it is imperative to develop new techniques to palliate pains and effectively cure cancers, and so some new medicines, including herbal therapy, have been developed to treat cancer patients.Raman spectroscopy is a powerful technique to diagnose cancer cells and to investigate the interaction between drugs and biomolecules, especially in solution and in situ. In the thesis, Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy were used to identify normal and cancer lung cells and investigate the interaction of mitoxantrone and elemene with DNA and lung cancer cells. The main results are as follows:(1)The studies on the interation of anticancer drug mitoxantrone with calf thymus DNA indicates that anticancer drug mitoxantrone interacte with calf thymus DNA bases by the intercalation of anthracycline into the AT or TA base pair plane, and it result in the disruption of the hydrogen bonds between calf thymus DNA bases, and thus the calf thymus DNA double-strand be disrupted into the B-form DNA double-strand segments.(2) Normal and cancerous human lung cells are identified and investigated by Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy, and the spectroscopic results show that phenylalanine, tyrosine, tryptophan of protein, DNA content and the lipids chain structure undergo subtle changes in the process of canceration. The results clearly indicate that Raman spectroscopy has the potential application in clinical diagnosis for human lung cancer, and can provide useful information on the mechanisms of cancinogenesis.(3) The studies on the interaction between elemene and lung cancer cells show that the interaction between elemene and lung cancer cells induce the transformation of the protein secondary structure from α-helices to β-sheets or disordered structures and the subtle changes of the DNA conformation, even the disruption of the DNA double-band.