Effects of celastrol on human cervical cancer cells as revealed by ion-trap gas chromatography-mass spectrometry based metabolic profiling.

Background: Celastrol, a quinine methide triterpene extracted from a Chinese medicine (Trypterygium wilfordii Hook F.), has the potential to become an anticancer drug with promising prospects. Cell culture metabolomics has been a powerful method to study metabolic profiles in cell line after drug treatment, which can be used for discovery of drug targets and investigation of drug effects.
Methods: We analyzed the metabolic modifications induced by celastrol treatment in human cervical cancer cells, using an ion-trap gas chromatography-mass spectrometry based metabolomics combined with multivariate statistical analysis, which allows simultaneous screening of multiple characteristic metabolic pathways related to celastrol treatment. Three representative apoptosis-inducing cytotoxic agents, namely cisplatin, doxorubicin hydrochloride and paclitaxel, were selected as positive control drugs to validate reasonableness and accuracy of our metabolomic investigation on celastrol.
Results: Anti-proliferation and apoptotic effects of celastrol were demonstrated by CCK-8 assay, Annexin-V/PI staining method, mitochondrial membrane potential (deltapsim) assay and caspase-3 assay. Several significant metabolites involved in energy, amino acid and nucleic acid metabolism in HeLa cells induced by celastrol and positive drugs were reported. Our method is proved to be effective and robust to provide new evidence of pharmacological mechanism of celastrol.
Conclusions: The metabolic alterations induced by drug treatment showed the impaired physiological activity of HeLa cells, which also indicated anti-proliferative and apoptotic effects of celastrol and these positive drugs.
General Significance: GC/MS-based metabolomic approach applied to cell culture could give valuable information on the systemic effects of celastrol in vitro and help us to further study its anticancer mechanism.