Cruciferous vegetables including diindolylmethane (DIM) have been shown to have anticancer activity. Especially, DIM-pPhBr and DIM-pPhF used in this study was reported to have more effective and less toxic effects than DIM. However, there is no report presenting their anti-tumorigenic activity in oral cancer. In the present study, we examined the effects of DIM-pPhBr and DIM-pPhF on the cell proliferation and apoptosis in KB human oral cancer cells. DIM-pPhBr and DIM-pPhF decreased cell proliferation and induced apoptosis evidenced by western blot analysis, DAPI staining and sub-G1 population. This provides the first evidence that DIM-pPhBr and DIM-pPhF originating from cruciferous vegetables induce apoptotic cell death in human oral cancer cells to inhibit cancer cell proliferation.

Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is the most common malignancy and is a major cause of worldwide cancer mortality. The proto-oncogene c-myb plays an important role in regulation of cell growth and differentiation, and it is expressed at high levels in hematopoietic cells and many other types of cancers. However, the function of c-myb is not well known in OSCC. The present study aimed to reveal the function of c-myb and to test the alternation of cell growth and signaling by c-myb in OSCC. In this study, c-myb and dominant-negatibe myb(DNmyb) were expressed in an adenovirus-mediated gene delivery system to KB cells. The over-expressed c-myb brought increased cellular proliferation compared with control cells. However, DN-myb infected KB cells showed significant reduction of cell growth and enhanced induction of apoptosis to activate PARP and caspase 9. c-myb induced increase of IGF-I, -II and IGF-IR expressions while DN-myb down-regulated these expression. Activation of ERK and Akt/PKB pathway was shown only in c-myb transduced cells. These findings suggest that the role of c-myb in cell growth of oral cancer cells is partially mediated through the modulation of IGFs, ERK and Akt/PKB. From this results, DN-myb is strongly recommended as a curable gene for the treatment of c-myb dependent malignancies such as OSCC.

A novel indirubin analog, 5'-nitro-indirubinoxime inhibits cell proliferation and induces apoptosis against various human cancer cells. In this study, we performed the microarray analysis to identify genes differentially expressed in the KB oral squamous carcinoma cells after treated with 5'-nitro-indirubinoxime. Among the 10,800 genes analyzed, 1,701 genes (15.8%) showed statistically different expression level in the 5'-nitro-indirubinoxime treated cells with respect to untreated control cells. Among those, 263 genes (15.5%) were down-regulated and 220 genes (12.9%) were up-regulated more than 2-fold. Functionally related gene clusters include genes associated with signal transduction (18.1%), especially genes related with apoptosis (3.5%) and cell cycle regulation (5.8%). Our application of microarray analysis on 5'-nitro-indirubinoxime treated oral cancer cells allows the identification of candidate genes for providing novel insights into the indirubin mediated antitumor activity.

Amino acid transporters are essential for the growth and proliferation in all living cells. Among the amino acid transporters, the system L amino acid transporters are the major nutrient transport system responsible for the Na+-independent transport of neutral amino acids including several essential amino acids. The L-type amino acid transporter 1 (LAT1) is over-expressed to support cell growth in malignant tumors. The double stranded RNA-mediated RNA interference (RNAi) analysis can be in a wide variety of eukaryotes to induce the sequence-specific inhibition of gene expression. In this study, we examined the effect of LAT1 short interfering RNA (siRNA) on cell growth using siRNA of LAT1 in the KB human oral squamous cell carcinoma. In the RT-PCR analysis and western blot analysis, the siRNA of LAT1 inhibited expressions of LAT1 mRNA and protein. The uptake of [14C]L-leucine was inhibited by siRNA of LAT1. In the MTT assay, the siRNA of LAT1 inhibited the growth of the KB cells in the time-dependent manner, indicating that the growth inhibition of KB cell by the siRNA of LAT1 is induced by the blocking of neutral amino acid transport mediated by LAT1. These results suggest that the transport of neutral amino acids including several essential amino acids into the KB human oral squamous cell carcinoma is mediated mainly by LAT1. Further, the LAT1 would be a new target for the inhibition of cancer cell growth.