Therefore, PTL-induced apoptosis was confirmed to be caspase-dependent. Discussion

Pancreatic cancer is a major unsolved health problem because of its biological aggressiveness. In the last decade, traditional clinical cancer therapy regimens as surgical tumor resection, cytotoxic chemotherapy, and radiation therapy have been supplemented with individualized targeted therapies directed against molecular determinants of the tumor. In spite of improved multimodal therapeutic regimens, 5 year survival does not exceed 5 percent. Inherent or acquired resistance towards see more cytotoxic agents, ionizing radiation, or both, is one of the hallmarks of biological aggressiveness of pancreas cancer as a solid tumor. To develop a new chemotherapeutic agent is still a clinical major concern as well as the better understanding of etiopathogenesis and molecular biology of pancreatic cancer. NF-kB is ubiquitous and can be detected in the cytoplasm of many cell types. Several researches have indicated that constitutive NF-kB activation may conduce to pancreatic tumorigenesis [15, 16]. Hence, the chemotherapeutic potential of NF-kB inhibitors should be evaluated.

PTL is one of the traditional medicines extracted from medical herb Feverfew LY294002 cell line in European and American. Studies have shown that PTL targets NF-kB via inhibition of the upstream regulator IkB kinase (IKK) [17] which phosphorylates IkB and targets it for proteasomal degradation. PTL and its analogues have recently been shown to inhibit proliferation, suppress invasiveness and induce apoptosis of several Clomifene human cancer cells [4–6, 18]. Further studies indicate that in vitro and vivo PTL and its analogues-induced growth inhibition and apoptosis is associated with NF-kB pathway, and the effect is more significant combined with COX inhibitor [12, 19]. But the detailed and precise mechanism underlying PTL induced apoptosis remains unclear which attracted our interest. In our study it was found that PTL significantly inhibited

growth of BxPC-3 cells. MTT assay demonstrated a dramatic loss of viability of cancer cell which was treated with PTL in a dose-dependent fashion. Next PTL-induced apoptosis was observed. Flow cytometry indicated that PTL conspicuously induced apoptosis which was confirmed by DNA fragmentation analysis. Meanwhile the migration and invasion assay indicated that PTL effectively suppressed cancer cell movement. Data mentioned above demonstrated PTL might be a novel chemotherapeutic agent. In order to explore the molecular mechanism of PTL-induced apoptosis in BxPC-3 cell, several genes were detected. Wang et al [20] demonstrated that combination therapy with PTL and arsenic trioxide inhibited the growth of pancreatic cancer cells via the mitochondrial pathway. Researches have reported that Bcl-2 family members are associated with mitochondria-related apoptosis [21, 22].