Discovering drug candidates for the modulation of metastasis is of great importance in inhibiting oral cancer malignancy. Although most pomegranate extract applications aim at the antiproliferation of cancer cells, its antimetastatic effects remain unclear, especially for oral cancer cells. The aim of this study is to evaluate the change of two main metastasis characters, migration and invasion of oral cancer cells. Further, we want to explore the molecular mechanisms of action of pomegranate extract (POMx) at low cytotoxic concentration. We found that POMx ranged from 0 to 50 μg/mL showing low cytotoxicity to oral cancer cells. In the case of oral cancer HSC-3 and Ca9-22 cells, POMx inhibits wound healing migration, transwell migration, and matrix gel invasion.Mechanistically, POMx downregulates matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-2 and MMP-9 Sheng-Yao Peng and Chien-Chou Hsiao contributed equally to this work.
The synthesis and anti-inflammatory effects of certain pyrazolo[4,3-c]quinoline derivatives 2a–2r are described. The anti-inflammatory activities of these derivatives were evaluated by means of inhibiting nitric oxide (NO) production in lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced RAW 264.7 cells. Among them, 3-amino-4-(4-hydroxyphenylamino)-1H-pyrazolo[4,3-c]-quinoline (2i) and 4-(3-amino-1H-pyrazolo[4,3-c]quinolin-4-ylamino)benzoic acid (2m) exhibited significant inhibition of LPS-stimulated NO production with a potency approximately equal to that of the positive control, 1400 W. Important structure features were analyzed by quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) analysis to give better insights into the structure determinants for predicting the inhibitory effects on the accumulation of nitric oxide for RAW 264.7 cells in response to LPS. In addition, our results indicated that their anti-inflammatory effects involve the inhibition of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) and cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) protein expression. Further studies on the structural optimization are ongoing.
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