Determination of Vulpinic Acid Effect on Apoptosis and mRNA Expression Levels in Breast Cancer Cell Lines.

OBJECTIVE: Breast cancer occurs in women and it is characterized by a high ratio of malignancy and metastasis and low rate of survival of patients. Despite improvements in treatments strategy is still poor, the discovery of an alternative therapeutic agent and clarifying the molecular mechanism of breast cancer development may offer new hope for its treatment.

METHODS: In this study, different concentrations of vulpinic acid (VA) lichen secondary metabolite were assessed for cytotoxic and apoptosis effect in breast cancer cells and non-cancerous cell line. In addition to qRT PCR analysis was also performed to gene expression patterns at transcriptom level.

RESULTS: The results demonstrated that VA significantly inhibited the viability of human breast cancer cells. MCF-7 cells were more sensitive to VA than other examined breast cancer cell lines. VA demonstrated significant apoptosis effect and Caspase-3 activity (p<0.05). Interestingly, VA could show toxic effect on breast cancer cells without damaging the non-cancerous epithelial cell. Although the cytotoxic effects of VA have been investigated, the effect of VA on some apoptosis related genes has not been studied in breast cancer cell lines. The gene expression of P53 genes was altered up to fourteen-fold levels in SK-BR-3 cell lines as compared to up to 2.5-fold in the MCF-12A cell line by VA.

CONCLUSION: These results suggest that VA induced apoptosis through mitochondrial/caspase apoptotic pathway in human breast cancer. It is implicated that VA can be used as a candidate molecule for future effective treatment of breast cancer.