Isolated or synergistic effect of anacardic acid on malignant neoplastic cells

Abstract

Cancer chemoprevention is defined as the use of natural or synthetic substances, with or without association, to prevent, reduce, block or reverse tumor development. The major challenges of chemoprevention are the detection of new compounds with antineoplastic action or the development of cell resistance by the drug. Therefore, ongoing researches are focused on discovering new compounds to act alone or in synergism with those already existing. Anacardic acid is a natural compound extracted from the cashew nut shell liquid and cashew leaves possessing with antitumor, antioxidant, gastric protector and antibiotic potential already demonstrated in the literature. However, there are no studies reporting the effects of anacardic acid alone or in combination with an antineoplastic agent on the overall expression of the gene products (i.e., the proteome) in malignant neoplastic cells. In this context, the present study aims to evaluate in vitro the influence of the anacardic acid, alone or in combination with the antineoplastic agent Paclitaxel on (i) cell viability, (ii) apoptosis, (iii) cell morphology, (iv) cell migration and (v) global protein expression profile in malignant neoplastic ovary and pancreatic cells, all of them cultured in a three-dimensional cellular culture model. In addition, the protein pool with altered expression will be compared to the information available in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) patient database. To achieve these objectives, we will analyze cell viability by fluorescent assay, apoptosis by flow cytometry, cell morphology by F-actin fluorescence labeling, cell migration by the wound healing assay; and the overall protein expression profile by mass spectrometry. For all analyses, the results will be considered significant when p <0.05. (AU)