Introduction
Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is the major histological type of esophageal cancer [
1,
2], which is the sixth leading cause of cancer-related mortality and the eighth most common cancer worldwide [
3,
4]. Despite recent progress in systematic therapeutics, ESCC remains one of the most intractable cancers, having an extremely low 5-year survival rate [
5,
6]. Therefore, the development of novel treatment options has been needed to improve the outcomes for ESCC patients.
Curcumin is a naturally occurring polyphenol derived from the root of
Curcuma longa that is recognized as a generally safe compound by the Food and Drug Administration [
7,
8]. Curcumin demonstrates various biological benefits including antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory actions, and is involved in the regulation of programmed cell death and survival pathways by modulating transcription factors such as nuclear factor-κB, growth factors, inflammatory cytokines, and receptors [
9]. Curcumin has been shown to have antitumor effects on several types of cancer cells including lung cancer [
10], glioblastoma [
11], colon cancer [
12], pancreatic cancer [
13], prostate cancer [
14], and ESCC [
15‐
17].
Despite the demonstration of the promising antitumor effects of curcumin in preclinical studies, its clinical use is currently limited because of its poor bioavailability in humans [
18]. Curcumin is not easily soluble in water [
19], and oral administration of curcumin does not achieve sufficient blood concentrations to exert therapeutic efficacy [
20‐
22]. To overcome this limitation, various strategies of drug development have been attempted to improve the bioavailability of curcumin [
23‐
27].
Theracurmin
® (THC, curcumin content 30% w/w) is an effective preparation of curcumin dispersed with colloidal submicron particles, making it easily disperse in water [
22]. Consequently, the bioavailability of curcumin in THC is much improved, and the area under the blood concentration–time curve (AUC) after the oral administration of THC is more than 40-fold higher than that of curcumin in rats and 27-fold higher than that of curcumin in humans [
22]. In fact, THC has been reported to be clinically useful for treating osteoarthritis [
28], muscle damage [
29], and atherosclerotic hyperlipidemia [
30]. With regard to experimental cancer research, the cytotoxicity or antitumor effects of THC have been reported using several cancer cell lines [
31,
32], but the effectiveness of THC against ESCC has not been fully clarified.
The purposes of our study were to investigate the antitumor effects of THC on ESCC cells and to compare the effects of curcumin and THC in vivo. Here, we found that induction of NAD(P)H quinone dehydrogenase 1 (NQO1), which is the enzyme that scavenge reactive oxygen species (ROS) [
33], plays an antagonistic role in THC-induced antitumor effects, and we, therefore, examined the effects on ESCC of a combination treatment with THC and NQO1 inhibitor.
Materials and methods
In vitro assay and analysis
Methods for cell culture, WST-1 cell viability assay, Caspase-Glo® 3/7 assay, spheroid assay, soft agar colony formation assay, microarray hybridization, real-time reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT–PCR), western blotting, chromatin protein isolation, measurement of intracellular and/or mitochondrial ROS levels, immunofluorescent staining for 8-hydroxy-2′-deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG), cell cycle assay, senescence-associated β-galactosidase (SABG) assay, viral infections, and metabolite analysis are described in Supplementary materials and methods.
Assessment of bioavailability and antitumor effects of curcumin and THC in vivo
All animal experiments conformed to the relevant regulatory standards and were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of Kyoto University (Med Kyo 18284).
C57BL/6 male mice (CLEA Japan, Inc., Tokyo, Japan) were given either a control diet (without curcumin or THC), a curcumin diet (containing 0.6 g/kg curcumin), or a THC diet (containing 2 g/kg THC that included 0.6 g/kg curcumin). After 1 week, blood was taken from the heart of mice and placed into heparinized tubes. Plasma was immediately prepared by centrifugation at 1000
g, 4 °C for 10 min and stored at − 80 °C until use. The plasma concentration of curcumin was measured using high-performance liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (MS)/MS as described previously [
22].
To compare the tumor growth-inhibitory effects of curcumin and THC, xenografted tumors derived from TE-11R cells were used. TE-11R cells (1.5 × 106 cells) were suspended in 50% Matrigel (BD Biosciences, San Jose, CA), followed by subcutaneous implantation into the left flank of 6-week-old hairless SCID male mice (Charles River Laboratories Japan Inc. Yokohama, Japan) (n = 15, day 0). The mice were randomly assigned to three groups (n = 5 each) and received either control, curcumin, or THC diet from day 0 to day 70.
The tumors were measured with a caliper, and tumor volume (mm3) was calculated using the following formula: (length) × (width)2 × 0.5.
Assessment of antitumor effects of THC and NQO1 inhibitor in vivo
Patient-derived xenograft (PDX) ESCC tumors were utilized to assess the therapeutic effects of THC and NQO1 inhibitor in vivo. All experiments conformed to the relevant regulatory standards and were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of Kyoto University (Med Kyo 18284) and the Ethics Committee of Kyoto University (G0770).
To establish PDX tumors, biopsy specimens taken from human ESCC tissue of primary site were placed in a subcutaneous pocket created by a 5-mm incision in the left flank of 6-week-old hairless SCID male mice (n = 20), which was then closed by suturing. Mice were randomly assigned to one of the four groups at day 21 (n = 5 each), and given either normal water or THC-containing water (5000 ppm) for drinking from day 21 to day 70. Either DMSO (mock) or 5-methoxy-1,2-dimethyl-3-[(4-nitrophenoxy)methyl]indole-4,7-dione (ES936) (sc-362737, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Inc., CA, USA) (5 mg/kg) was administered intraperitoneally every other day from day 21 to day 70.
The tumors were monitored with a caliper, and tumor volume (mm3) was calculated using the following formula: (length) × (width)2 × 0.5.
Immunohistochemical staining
Immunohistochemical staining was performed as described previously [
34]. Additional information is given in Supplementary materials and methods.
Statistical analyses
Data are presented as the mean ± standard error (SE) of triplicate experiments unless otherwise stated. Differences between two groups were analyzed using the 2-tailed Student’s t test, and *P < 0.05 and **P < 0.01 were considered significant. All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS 21 for Windows (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA).
Discussion
Highly bioavailable curcumin (Theracurmin®, THC) showed antitumor effects on various types of ESCC cells and xenografted tumors. THC increased ROS levels in accompany with the activation of NRF2–NMRAL2P–NQO1 pathway. Since NQO1 revealed to play an antagonistic and antioxidative role in THC-induced cytotoxicity, we proposed a combination treatment with THC and NQO1 inhibitor. As a result, such a treatment strategy exhibited potent antitumor effects on ESCC PDX tumors.
In this study, biological effects (e.g., cytotoxic effects, ROS production, and sensitization of NQO1 inhibitor) of THC were similar to those of curcumin in vitro (Figs.
1a,
4a,
6c and Supplementary Fig. 6). We suggest that this is because THC is identical with curcumin as a component [
22]. However, the antitumor effect of THC in vivo was much higher than that of an equal dose of curcumin. We suggest that the difference in the antitumor effect between THC and curcumin in vivo is caused by their different bioavailability (Fig.
2a).
The peak plasma curcumin levels following oral THC administration (5000 ppm) in mice reached 3973.8 ng/mL (Fig.
7a), which is roughly equivalent to 11 μM. In our in vitro experiments, we used 5–50 μM THC and the IC
50 values of THC in various ESCC cells were between 7.03 and 34.98 μM. Because the plasma curcumin concentration after THC administration (400 mg curcumin/day) in humans was reported to be at about 3.7 μM [
43], we presume that the dose of THC used in our experiments does not greatly exceed the achievable physiological range.
In the present study, NMRAL2P was upregulated in ESCC cells treated with THC. NMRAL2P is a long noncoding RNA that acts as a coactivator of NQO1 [
38]. Although its precise function remains to be clarified, potential roles for NMRAL2P as a prognostic factor and/or a therapeutic target for cancer have been reported [
44,
45]. Our results showed that
KEAP1 knockdown increased expression of NMRAL2P, while
NRF2 knockdown reduced it. Moreover,
NMRAL2P knockdown inhibited NQO1 induction by THC. These results are consistent with the previous reports [
36‐
38], and indicate that NMRAL2P is acting downstream of NRF2 and upstream of NQO1 in the NRF2-related signal cascade.
We showed that THC treatment increased intracellular and mitochondrial ROS levels in ESCC cells. These results were consistent with the previous reports showing curcumin-mediated ROS generation [
46‐
48] that led to mitochondrial damage [
49]. In this study, we also demonstrated that THC treatment affected the TCA cycle, which may retain a role in cancer cell metabolism. In particular, 2-oxoglutaric acid plays critical roles as a precursor of glutamine formation, as a nitrogen transporter for the urea cycle and/or ammonia detoxification, and as a cosubstrate for dioxygenases [
50]. In addition, 2-oxoglutaric acid-dependent dioxygenases mediate the demethylation of DNA and histones, which is involved in regulation of the expression of many genes [
51,
52], and depletion of 2-oxoglutaric acid was able to cause epigenetic changes [
53]. Thus, the decrease in 2-oxoglutaric acid caused by THC may induce a range of aberrations in cellular metabolism.
We showed that THC increased nuclear NRF2 as well as NQO1 expressions. As NRF2 is upregulated by the ROS production [
39] and NQO1 is a downstream factor of NRF2 [
39], we suggest that nuclear NRF2 is increased via THC-mediated ROS production and NQO1 is upregulated via NRF2 activation. To examine the role of NQO1 in THC-mediated cytotoxicity in ESCC cells, we performed the experiments using cells with
NQO1 gene modification and/or NQO1 inhibitors. Knockdown of
NQO1 or administration of NQO1 inhibitor resulted in an increase of ROS and/or 8-OHdG levels in THC-treated ESCC cells, while overexpression of NQO1 resulted in a decrease of 8-OHdG in THC-treated ESCC cells. These results suggest that NQO1 plays an antioxidative role in THC-mediated cytotoxicity. As NQO1 acts as a reductase [
33,
54‐
56], cells undergoing oxidative stress are considered to induce NQO1 to protect cells from those stresses. Accordingly, we thought that inhibition of NQO1 could enhance the antitumor effects of THC and we revealed that the strategy is effective.
We showed that basal levels of NQO1 protein in ESCC cells tended to be high, compared with those in normal esophageal epithelial cells (Supplementary Fig.
5c). Therefore, cytotoxic effect of THC may occur efficiently on ESCC cells in the presence of NQO1 inhibitor. As NQO1 inhibitor has not been used clinically, future studies to develop NQO1 inhibitors are warranted.
A limitation of this study is that we could not determine whether NMRAL2P regulates NQO1 directly or indirectly. Moreover, it remains unclear whether the antitumor effect of THC and NQO1 inhibitor is due to the direct effect on tumor cells or indirect effect on microenvironment. Further study will be required to address these questions.
In conclusion, THC exhibits in vitro and in vivo antitumor effects, and showed remarkably higher bioavailability and stronger antitumor effects than curcumin in vivo. THC induced ROS in accompany with the activation of NRF2–NMRAL2P–NQO1 pathway. NQO1 played an antioxidative role in THC-mediated cytotoxicity. Importantly, NQO1 inhibitor enhanced the THC-induced antitumor effects (Supplementary Fig. 7). These results suggest the potential usefulness of combination therapy with THC and NQO1 inhibitor for the treatment of ESCC.
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.