Gleditsia sinensis fruit extract induced growth inhibition involves basic fibroblast growth factor and nitric oxide

Recently we have shown the anti proliferative activity of Gleditsia sinensis fruit extract (GSE) on various solid tumour and leukaemia cell lines as well as primary cultured bone marrow cells isolated from patients with acute and chronic myelogenous leukaemia. We further studied whether the growth inhibitory effect of GSE involves basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) in cancer cell lines including breast cancer MDA-MB231, nasopharyngeal cancer CNE-2 and prostate cancer LNCaP. We also investigated whether GSE could alter the production of nitric oxide (NO) pattern from these cancer cell lines. Growth inhibition assay was quantitated by sulforhodamine B protein staining method. Enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was used to quantitate the total bFGF protein. The amount of NO secreted into culture medium in terms of nitrite ion concentration was measured by the Greiss method. ELISA showed that GSE could stimulate total bFGF protein level which was dose-dependent. NO production was also stimulated from these cancer cell lines after treating with GSE. Both of the increment in total bFGF and NO levels were correlated with the degree of growth inhibition. Changes involving cell shrinkage and detachment of cancer cells could readily be observed. Taken together, our results here suggest that growth inhibition induced by GSE in these solid tumour cell lines may involve both bFGF and NO regulations.