Study on the molecular mechanism of Tripterygium wilfordii

Triptolide, an active component of triptolide, was isolated from triptolide, a traditional Chinese herbal medicine, in a new study by researchers from the school of pharmacy, Xiamen University In vivo and in vitro experiments confirmed that triptolide can regulate the signal pathway of cancer cell survival mediated by trxrα Relevant research papers are published in PLoS One Professor Zeng Jinzhang and Professor Zhang Xiaokun of Xiamen University are co authors of this article Lu Na and Liu Jinxing, two graduate students, are the co authors of this article It is one of the important strategies to search for antitumor active ingredients from natural products Tripterygium wilfordii is a kind of traditional Chinese herbal medicine with rich resources in China Its active ingredients with various structures have obvious anti-inflammatory, immunosuppressive and antitumor effects It is a treasure of development and treatment of drugs, but Tripterygium wilfordii has great toxicity, molecular target and effect The unclear mechanism is the key to restrict the development of Tripterygium wilfordii into a real therapeutic drug In this paper, we isolated triptolide from Tripterygium Wilfordii and confirmed that Tripterygium wilfordii regulated the signal pathway of cancer cell survival mediated by trxra The results showed that triptolide strongly induced apoptosis of cancer cells depending on the expression level of trxrα in cells, which confirmed that trxrα was an important intracellular target of triptolide Trxrα is a mutant of retinol X receptor α (RXR α) truncated at the N-terminal of nuclear receptor It is widely found in various tumor tissues Unlike its full-length RXR α? Which is mainly located in the nucleus, trxrα? Is usually located in the cytoplasm It activates the PI3K / Akt signal transduction pathway through the interaction with p85, which is dependent on the expression of tumor necrosis factor TNF α? In tumor microenvironment The high expression of trxrα plays an important role in promoting tumor growth The researchers confirmed that triptolide selectively induced the degradation of trxra and inhibited the activity of Akt dependent on trxra, but did not affect the full-length RXR α The researchers also confirmed that triptolide targeting trxrα strongly activated TNF α death signal and promoted the anticancer activity of other chemotherapy The new study confirmed that triptolide is a new regulator of trxra dependent survival signaling pathway, which provides a new insight into the mechanism of triptolide induced apoptosis of cancer cells Triptolide represents the most promising therapeutic precursor of traditional Chinese herbal natural products with adverse side effects The new findings provide molecular basis and new direction for the development of improved triptolide analogues for cancer treatment.