| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立陽明大學 === 生理學研究所 === 102 === The cardiac glycosides are a group of compounds isolated from plants and some animals, and have been used in therapy for heart failure clinically since many years ago. Digoxin and digitoxin are the two major cardiac glycosides extracted from the foxglove plant, and the first traditional Chinese medicine extracts introduced to western medicine. Recently, some reports have shown that cardiac glycosides affect growth or survival in many cancer cell lines, including prostate cancer, lung cancer and human hepatoma cells. However, there are rare findings between cardiac glycosides and ovarian cancer cells. It has been well known that SKOV-3 is a human epithelium ovarian cancer cell line from sixty-years-old female Caucasian. Based on MTT assay, both digoxin and digitoxin have been shown to inhibit the proliferation of SKOV-3 in a dose-dependent manner for 24 and 48 hours. Moreover, there were no formation of colonies during digoxin (IC50, 10-6M) and digitoxin (IC50, 10-6M) treatments for 10 days. To examine the cytotoxicity of digoxin and digitoxin, LDH assay was employed. Digoxin (10-4M) and digitoxin (10-5M) treatments for 24 hours leading to a 10% elevated cytotoxicity. The continuous cell cycle is one of the key points when normal cells become cancer cells. In our results, we found that digoxin and digitoxin lead the cell cycle of SKOV-3 cells to arrest in G0/G1 phase measured by DNA content analysis, and increase the hypodiploid cells ratio for 72 hours . These data suggest that digoxin and digitoxin inhibit the growth of human epithelium ovarian cancer cell line, SKOV-3, through cell cycle arrest and cytotoxic effect. We expect that the present results will provide a new strategy for the therapy of ovarian cancer.
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