Matrine, a potential c-Myc inhibitor, suppresses ribosome biogenesis and nucleotide metabolism in myeloid leukemia

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that matrine, a natural compound extracted from the herb Sophora flavescens, has a good anti-leukemia effect, but its key target and mechanism remains unclear. Here, we found that only c-Myc could respond rapidly to matrine treatment in three myeloid leukemia cell lines, and matrine inhibited both transcription and translation of c-Myc. Ribosome biogenesis and nucleotide metabolism, the key downstream of c-Myc, were significantly suppressed after matrine treatment. Therefore, our results confirmed that matrine is a special c-Myc inhibitor which suppresses ribosome biogenesis and nucleotide metabolism by inhibiting c-Myc in myeloid leukemia. This study provides scientific basis for the development of matrine derivatives to c-Myc-driven cancers.

Matrine regulates miR‐495‐3p/miR‐543/PDK1 axis to repress the progression of acute myeloid leukemia via the Wnt/β‐catenin pathway

“…Matrine was reported to be widely used for treating heart arrhythmia, liver fibrosis, and viral hepatitis in China (Chen et al, 2016;Yu et al, 2014;Zhang et al, 2021Zhang et al, , 2023. In particularly, the anti-tumor activities of matrine have been confirmed in several solid tumors (Chen et al, 2021;Wei et al, 2018;Zhao et al, 2021), multiple myeloma (Han et al, 2010;Yu et al, 2013), and leukemia (Zhong et al, 2022). Previous studies indicated that matrine could trigger apoptosis and repress proliferation in chronic myeloid leukemia cells (Lin et al, 2019;Ma et al, 2015).…”