Investigation of apoptotic activities of NOE on human ovarian cancer cells

Ovarian cancer is one of the most malignan cancers of the reproductive system of women. Along with the other cancer types, ovarian cancer requires alternative agents for treatment due to the limited efficiency and strong side effects of classical chemotherapeutics and long treatment process. Recently, cancer investigations are focused on intracellular targets for cancer therapy. Sphingolipid molecules, especially ceramides of them are reported as potent targets for cancer therapy. Increased leves of ceramides into the cancer cells induce apoptosis and this increase can be caused by supressing ceramidases via new generation inhibitors of the enzymes. In this study, NOE (Oleoyl ethanolamide), a ceramidase inhibitor was used to cause cytotoxicity and induce apoptosis in human ovarian cancer cells, OVCAR-3. Our results clearly showed that NOE significantly reduced cell viability and caused cytotoxicity together with morphological changes indicating apoptosis that is proved with the flow cytometry results. NOE is proposed for a candicate for designing anti-cancer agent after further investigations.