Discipline: Biological Sciences
Subcategory: Cancer Research
Trentyn Shaw - Alabama State University
Co-Author(s): Sanjay Kumar, James Stokes III, Brittany Buck-Hollins, Manoj Mishra
Despite the many chemotherapeutic advancements being made in the 21st century, drug toxicity and drug effectiveness is still a concerning problem. The purpose of this study was to find a drug that would produce little to no toxicity and conjugate it to a drug-carrying vehicle to be tested against healthy and cancerous cell lines with the hypothesis that it would kill the cancerous cells but not harm the healthy cells. The drug of study in this experiment was resveratrol (RES) which is a natural polyphenolic compound found in several plants and has shown to have many beneficial characteristics such as being an antioxidant. It has also been noted that resveratrol has shown anti-cancer and anti-proliferation characteristics as well which makes it a candidate for anticancer therapeutic drugs. In this study, resveratrol was conjugated to nanodiamonds (DND), a carbon containing nano compound derived from high destructive collisions such as explosions that contains cancer-therapeutic and imaging properties, and tested against Transgenic Adenocarcinoma of Mouse Prostate (TRAMP C1, C2, and C3) cell lines. TRAMP C1 and C2 is tumorigenic (forms tumor) while TRAMP C3 non-tumorigenic (does not form tumor) . Briefly, TRAMP cells were cultured and treated with different concentrations of DND, RES, and RDNDs (resveratrol loaded nanodiamonds) in 96-well plates (triplicates), incubated at different time points and analyzed for for cell viability/toxicity and apoptotic pathways. The data collected revealed that RDNDs did indeed modulated 1) the proliferation of the TRAMP C1, C2 and C3 cells, 2) brought significant changes in the mitochondrial membrane potential, and 3) modulated the apoptotic pathways. Therefore, this study shows that the effects of resveratrol can be enhanced when conjugated to nanodiamonds and could be a possible cancer therapeutic drug
delivery system.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): Funding Acknowledgement(s): This work was supported in part by grants from National Institutes of Health P20CA192976 and the National Science Foundation (DUE-1154214)
Faculty Advisor: Manoj Mishra, mmishra@alasu.edu
Role: I was involved in the resveratrol nanodiamond synthesis and testing them against the various cell lines.