Marsdenia tenacssima extract and its functional components inhibits proliferation and induces apoptosis of human Burkitt leukemia/lymphoma cells in vitro and in vivo

Abstract

Burkitt lymphoma is a fast growing non-Hodgkin lymphoma that occurs primarily in young males. The causes of Burkitt lymphoma include chromosome rearrangement and virus infection, but accurate and complete reasons remain to be discovered. The available treatment for Burkitt lymphoma is chemotherapy and radiation therapy. It is a highly aggressive B-cell neoplasm with not all patients cured, in spite of current therapies. This study evaluated the effects of traditional Chinese medicine Marsdenia tenacssima (MTE) and its component compound Tenacigenoside A (TGTA) and 11α-O-benzoyl-12β-O-acetyltenacigenin B (TGTB) on human Burkitt lymphoma growth. It was observed that MTE, TGTA or TGTB inhibited cell growth and induced apoptosis of Burkitt lymphoma cells in culture. In lymphoma bearing NOD/SCID nude mice, both TGTA and TGTB inhibited tumor growth and improved animal survival. TGTA and TGTB significantly increased tumor cell apoptosis on lymphoma bearing mice, primarily through down-regulation of BCL2 and BCL-XL and up-regulation of BID.

Keywords::

• Burkitt leukemia
• lymphoma
• Marsdenia tenacssima
• Tenacigenoside A
• tenacigenin B
• Raji cells
• BCL2
• BCL-XL
• BID

Acknowledgments

This work is funded by the Top Six Elite Scholar Program of Jiangsu Province China #2009-47-D and the Jiangsu Provincial Administration of traditional Chinese medicine. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We thank Dr. Glen Raffel and Dr. Huapeng Li for discussing, writing and editing the manuscript.

Potential conflict of interest

Disclosure forms provided by the authors are available with the full text of this article online.