Evaluation of roscovitine anticancer agent as a reference compound for cancer and apoptosis studies

Abstract

Apoptosis induction is a well-known strategy to mitigate the growth of cancerous cells. The aim of this study is to determine the possibility of using roscovitine as a reference agent for evaluating novel pro-apoptotic agents. This was conducted through evaluating its cytotoxic activity of roscovitine using MTT assay on HCT-116, MCF-7 and HepG2 cancer cell lines, as well as WI-38 normal cell line, and its ability to induce apoptosis by means of measuring the concentration of p53 and caspase 3 using ELISA technique. Roscovitine was found to exhibit a potent cytotoxic activity on all the cancerous cells, while normal cells was less affected after roscovitine treatment. In addition, the levels of p53 and caspase 3 in HCT-116 cell line were raised by 18.25 and 10.77 folds, respectively, following treatment with roscovitine. Thus, it was assured that roscovitine is a potent apoptosis inducing agent, and so it could be used as a reference compound in studying novel pro-apoptotic compounds