Cancer: Leukemia, colon, ER+ Ovarian
Action: Apoptotic, anti-cancer
Angelicin is a furanocoumarin. It can be found in Bituminaria bituminosa and is structurally related to psoralens, a well-known chemical class of photosensitizers used for its anti-proliferative activity in treatment of different skin diseases.
Induces Apoptosis
The cellular cytotoxicity of angelicin was examined by cell viability assay, DNA fragmentation by DNA ladder assay, and activation of caspases and Bcl-2 family proteins by Western blot analyzes. The results suggest that angelicin increased cellular cytotoxicity in a dose- and time-dependent manner with IC(50) of 49.56 µM at 48 hours of incubation.
In addition, angelicin dose-dependently downregulated the expression of anti-apoptotic proteins including Bcl-2, Bcl-xL, and Mcl-1 suggesting the involvement of the intrinsic mitochondria-mediated apoptotic pathway which did not participate in Fas/FasL-induced caspase-8-mediated extrinsic, MAP kinases, and PI3K/AKT/GSK-3β pathway.
Taken together, these data indicate that angelicin is an effective apoptosis-inducing natural compound of human SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells which suggests that this compound may have a role in future therapies for human neuroblastoma cancer (Rahman et al., 2012).
Anti-cancer
Three crude drugs Saussureae Radix, Psoraleae Semen and Aurantti Fructus Immaturus significantly inhibited the proliferation of temperature-sensitive rat lymphatic endothelial (TR-LE) cells in vitro. Angelicin isolated from Aurantti Fructus Immaturus showed selective inhibition of the proliferation of TR-LE cells (Jeong et al., 2013). Angelicin, isolated from Bituminaria morisiana was subjected to cytotoxicity screening against a panel of human cancer cells (Leonti et al., 2010).
References
Jeong D, Watari K, Shirouzu T, et al. (2013). Studies on lymphangiogenesis inhibitors from Korean and Japanese crude drugs. Biol Pharm Bull, 36(1):152-7.