13. Evaluation of the Anticancer Activitiy of Sanguinarine in the Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma Cell Line

Oral squamous cell carcinoma（OSCC）is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths. The increasing number of patient makes it imperative to develop new drugs for improving the efficiency of the conventional chemotherapies against OSCC. In recent years, although the discovery and development of anticancer drugs focus on mechanism-based agents that act on specific molecular targets associated with the biology of a cancer, there is growing interest in the use of natural product compounds to search for useful candidates. Of the quaternary benzophenanthridine alkaloids, “sanguinarine”is a phytoalexin with anti-microbial, anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory, pro-apoptotic effects. It inhibits the proliferation of cancerous cells from different origins, including lung, breast, pancreatic and the colon, but nothing is known of its effects on OSCC. Here using in vitro assay systems, we demonstrate the antitumor activity of sanguinarine in OSCC cell line, SAS. The anti-proliferative and invasive effects are confirmed with IC50 values in the concentration range of 0.75-1.0μM by MTT assay and invasive assay, respetively. Sanguinarine is also able to suppress cell anchorage-independent growth, wheareas it does not affect the adhering capabilities of the cells. Finally, we found that sanguinarine induces apoptotic cell death by activating both caspase-3 and caspase-7. Taken together, these results demonstrate that sanguinarine is a potential inhibitor of tumorgenesis and suggest that it may be valuable in the development of new anticancer drugs for the treatment of OSCC.