Zerumbone Exerts Antiproliferative Activity via Apoptosis on HepG2 Cells

Zerumbone, a cytotoxic component isolated from Zingiber zerumbet Smith, significantly displayed antiproliferative effect towards human cancer cell lines including the human liver cancer HepG2 cell line (IC50 of 3.45 ± 0.026 μg/ml), human breast cancer MCF-7 cell line (IC50 of 3.73 ± 0.085 μg/ml), human ovarian cancer Caov-3 cell line (IC50 of 4.73 ± 0.052 μg/ml) and human cervix cancer HeLa cell line (IC50 of 5.43 ± 0.033 μg/ml). The action of zerumbone appeared to be cytoselective as its effect on the proliferation of non-malignant Chang liver cells generated IC50 value that was much higher than that obtained for all zerumbonetreated cancer cell lines (10.96 ± 0.059 μg/ml). The antiproliferative effect of zerumbone was also shown to occur via apoptosis.The extent of DNA fragmentation, evaluated by the terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end labelling assay, showed that zerumbone significantly increased apoptosis of the HepG2 cells in a time-course manner and that its effect was generally more potent than cisplatin.

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