Sanguinarine suppresses cell proliferation, migration and invasion in nasopharyngeal carcinoma inhibiting mTOR signaling.

Objective: To confirm the anti-NPC effect of sanguinarine (SA) through a series of wet experiments.
Methods: NPC cell viability was determined by proliferation experiment. Cell clone formation experiment, cell scratch test, transwell migration and invasion experiment and flow cytometry-based cell apoptosis assay were further performed. In addition, Western blotting was performed to investigate the cell signaling pathway. All the relevant experimental data were statistically processed using SPSS 16.0 software.
Results: The results showed that sanguinarine represented a time and dose dependent inhibition effects on NPC cell proliferation including the low differentiated CNE2 cells and high metastatic 5-8F cells, along with the cell cloning ability reduction. In addition, sanguinarine has a certain inhibitory effect on the invasion and migration of NPC cells. Mechanistically, sanguinarine displayed the anti-NPC effects mainly involved into the suppression of mTOR signaling and cell apoptosis, which is closely associated with the tumor growth and metastatic malignancy.
Conclusions: Collectively, we discover that sanguinarine is a new high-efficiency anti-NPC monomer of Chinese medicine, with a value for the follow-up pre-clinical research.