Gemcitabine Sensitivity on Podocalyxin Knockdown Pancreatic Cell Line SW1990

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Date
2014-12-01
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
In this study, we tested cell survival following treatments of Gemcitabine (GE) in scrambled control and Podocalyxin (PODXL) knockdown pancreatic cancer cell line SW1990. After testing several major chemotherapeutic drugs with MTT cell survival assay, GE, brand name Gemzar, was shown to have a much higher cytotoxic effect on PODXL knockdown cells than control SW1990 pancreatic cancer cells. Upon observation, we suggested that knocking down PODXL could potentially reduce the resistance and/or increase the sensitivity of SW1990 to GE. With this hypothesis, we proceeded to test the expression of NF-κB targeted genes, which are indicator of cell survival mostly related to cell apoptosis, in both scrambled control and PODXL knockdown cells with and without GE treatments. The seven specific genes analyzed were cyclin D1, c-myc, bcl-2, bcl-xL, c-IAP1, cox-2 and MMP9. Apoptosis-related gene expressions were analyzed by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (rt-PCR). Our results showed that five out of seven of the anti apoptotic genes were down regulated in PODXL knockdown and two out of seven of the anti apoptotic genes were significantly down regulated in PODXL knockdown following GE treatment. Combined data supports our hypothesis that PODXL knockdown cells are more sensitive to GE as a result of apoptosis induction.
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Keywords
Podocalyxin, Gemcitabine
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