Endocrine Abstracts

Thyroid cancer is the most prevalent cancer among endocrine malignancies. Surgical resection combined with radioactive iodine therapy has been proved effective in treating differentiated thyroid cancer, including papillary and follicular thyroid cancers (FTC). However, patients with incurable differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC), poorly differentiated thyroid cancer (PDTC) and anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) exhibit worse prognosis. Therefore, a novel and effective treatment is urgently needed to deal with the current treatment.

Compounds from traditional Chinese medicine have been examined for their anti-cancer potential in recent decades. Among them, evodiamine is one of the important components of Chinese herb Wu-Chu-Yu, and has been reported to contribute on anti-inflammatory effects, anti-angiogenesis, anti-tumor growth, anti-invasive, and metastatic activities, and up-regulating apoptosis.

In the present study, we examined anticancer effects of evodiamine in FTC, PDTC, and ATC cells respectively. Evodiamine inhibited cellular growth of FTC, PDTC, and ATC cells in a dosage-dependent and -time dependent manner. Moreover, cell cycle arrest at G2/M phase in all of the cells was also revealed under evodiamine treatment. In addition, evodiamine also induced apoptosis via up regulation of intrinsic and extrinsic pathways activation and PARP cleavage. Most importantly, evodiamine suppressed in vitro colonies formation and cell invasion of ATC cells was also determined. Our results demonstrate that evodiamine induces cell cycle arrest and caspase-dependent apoptosis leading to inhibit proliferation of multiple types of human thyroid cancer cells. It suggests that evodiamine could be a chemo-therapeutic candidate for human thyroid cancers.