Marine Drugs (Jun 2019)

Marine Carotenoid Fucoxanthin Possesses Anti-Metastasis Activity: Molecular Evidence

  • Sukant Garg,
  • Sajal Afzal,
  • Ahmed Elwakeel,
  • Damini Sharma,
  • Navaneethan Radhakrishnan,
  • Jaspreet Kaur Dhanjal,
  • Durai Sundar,
  • Sunil C. Kaul,
  • Renu Wadhwa

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/md17060338
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 17, no. 6
p. 338

Abstract

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Fucoxanthin is commonly found in marine organisms; however, to date, it has been one of the scarcely explored natural compounds. We investigated its activities in human cancer cell culture-based viability, migration, and molecular assays, and found that it possesses strong anticancer and anti-metastatic activities that work irrespective of the p53 status of cancer cells. In our experiments, fucoxanthin caused the transcriptional suppression of mortalin. Cell phenotype-driven molecular analyses on control and treated cells demonstrated that fucoxanthin caused a decrease in hallmark proteins associated with cell proliferation, survival, and the metastatic spread of cancer cells at doses that were relatively safe to the normal cells. The data suggested that the cancer therapy regimen may benefit from the recruitment of fucoxanthin; hence, it warrants further attention for basic mechanistic studies as well as drug development.

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