Assistant Professor, Chapman University, Orange, CA
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the US with the overall five year survival rate approximately 3-5%. The understanding of the molecular alterations that occur in this disease will lead to designing better ways to treat this cancer. Since many studies have shown evidence that different cancers can be avoided by lifestyle modifications, the demand for dietary alternatives has prompted explorative studies on botanically derived disease-preventing compounds. The first type of botanical compound of interest is polyphenols found in pomegranates. The other compound of interest is caffeine. For the past few years, my laboratory has been studying how the combination of caffeine and pomegranate juice extract (PE) inhibits pancreatic cancer cell growth. We showed that the combination treatment was more effective in inhibiting cell growth than treatment of either PE or caffeine alone. One of the most striking results we found was that the combination treatment of PE and caffeine was most effective at decreasing cell invasion in pancreatic cancer cells when compared to either PE or caffeine treatments in an invasion assay. Compared to the no treatment conditions, the combination treatment led to a more significant inhibition in cell invasion than either treatment alone. We now want to complete a differential gene expression study to identify specific genes that might be involved in either promoting apoptosis or inhibiting cancer cell invasion. In this RNA-Seq experiment, RNA was isolated from pancreatic cancer cells alone and from pancreatic cancer cells treated with a combination of caffeine and PE for 48 hours. Genes with significant changes in expression will be identified with respect to either apoptotic or anti-invasive/migrator pathways.
Materials are under development.
Materials are under development.
