Source: School of Life Sciences
Written by: School of Life Sciences
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

The research group of Prof. Liang-Hu Qu and Prof. Hui Zhou from the State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol of Sun Yat-sen University has made great progress in a novel mechanism of reversal Chemoresistance of Leukemia. They found that apoptosis induced by a natural drug, oridonin could be widely applied as a strategy for addressing chemoresistance of leukemia. The research findings have been published online on May 28, 2014 in Cancer Research.

Chemoresistance of malignant cancer has long been viewed as a worldwide problem in the field of cancer biology and the development of new anti-cancer drugs. Under the guidance of Professors Qu and Zhou, two Ph.D. students, Heng-You Weng and Hui-Lin Huang, together with their coworkers, discover that oridonin exhibits significant synergistic effects with other anti-cancer drugs, such as VP-16, in cultured cells as well as mouse tumor xenograft models. Further mechanistic studies reveal that oridonin upregulates the BIM-S pro-apoptotic protein by diminishing the expression of miR-17 and miR-20a miRNAs, leading to mitochondria-dependent apoptosis and the reversal of chemoresistance in leukemia cells.

This research provides a rationale in addressing chemoresistance. Due to its distinct mechanism of action involving miRNA-dependent cell apoptosis, oridonin may be used in combination with many current anti-cancer drugs to reverse the chemoresistance of leukemia cells, which has particularly important application value.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the 973 Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China.