In vitro study of alkyl gallates as a growth inhibitor of cervical HeLa cancer cells

Cervical cancer is the third most common cancer in women and the fifth most common in the world. In Indonesia, the prevalence of cervical cancer is 12.8 out of 100,000 women in 2010, in which become the second most frequent cancer. Current treatments of cervical cancer are surgery, radiation therapy, chemoradiation, or combination therapy. However, the high rate of complications and severe side effects of those therapies indicating the need for the new anti-cervical cancer agent. Gallic acid is known to have potential anticancer effects. Structure modification of gallic acid into its derivatives of alkyl gallates are expected to increase the hydrophobicity of alkyl gallates which led to the improvement of its anticancer activity due to its ability to penetrate cancer cell membrane easily. In this work, we conducted in vitro study of ten synthesized alkyl gallates (methyl gallate, ethyl gallate, propyl gallate, butyl gallate, isobutyl gallate, t-butyl gallate, amyl gallate, isoamyl gallate, heptyl gallate and octyl gallate) against HeLa cervical cancer cells by MTS assay. In vitro cytotoxic activity of alkyl gallates on HeLa cells are expressed in median inhibitory activity (IC50) value. The results showed that heptyl gallate and octyl gallate had the strong cytotoxicity against cervical HeLa cells with IC50 value of 12.32 µg/ml and 51.98 µg/ml, respectively. This result suggests that heptyl gallate and octyl gallate are promising candidates for the new anti-cervical cancer agents.