Inhibitory Effects And Inductive Of Apoptosis Of Sanguinarine On Cells

Background: At the present time, it is terrible in the Asia where the liver cancer and the gastric cancer rate are higher. Surgical operation associated with chemotherapeutics is an ideal method to treat cancer, however we find that on effective therapy is available for cancer because tumor cells existence is drug-fast. It is a hot topic to extract a useful ingredient treating cancer from traditional Chinese medicine. Sanguinarine, a benzo[c]phenthridine alkaloid extracted form Macleya Cordata, exhibits an anticancer property.To study the mechanism of therapeutic action of SA, in this paper, we choose BGC-823 cells and SMMC-7221 cells as the subject investigated. We found the growth of cancer cells has been inhibited by SA, which the morphological changes of cells were observed on optical-microscope. By using trypan blue dye exclusion test and MTT assay to measure the inhibition of SA on cancer cells, we found that the inhibition rate increases with the decreasing of cell inoculums density, the increasing of treating time and the increasing of drug concentration, and the largest inhibitorion rate exceeds 90% in the experiment. We used Hochest 33258 dye assay to find that with the increasing of drug concentration, the apoptosis rate increasing, the cell sizes decreasing and the cytoplasm concentrating. At the same conditions, the early apoptotic cells rate and the cell cycle of cancer cells induced by SA were detected on flow cytometry. And we found that SA can inhibit proliferation of SMMC-7221 cells by blocking cells at G2/M phase and inhibit proliferation of BGC-823 cells by blocking cells at G1/G0phase on a concentration-dependent manner. The molecular characters of apoptosis were analyzed by Western blot to detect the protein expression of Bcl-2 and Bax as that the increasing of drug concentration can result in the Bcl-2/Bax ratio reduces.