Fucoidan enhances the anti-cancer activity of the chemotherapeutic agent

August 8, 2019 Molly

Do you know that fucoidan has the power to increase the effectiveness of chemo-drugs? In this blog, I am going to discuss how fucoidan increase effects of the chemo-drugs by using an example of breast cancer such as estrogen, progesterone receptor-positive, HER2 negative (MCF-7) and triple-negative (MDA-MB231) breast cancers.

The following observations are according to the research by Zhingyuan Zhang et al. (https://www.mdpi.com/1660-3397/11/1/81/htm). They conducted a test by using fucoidan (FE) and three chemotherapeutic agents, Cisplatin (CDDP), Tamoxifen (TAM), and Paclitaxel (TAXOL).

At first, when we did not use any chemotherapeutic agents, fucoidan showed dose-dependent cytotoxicity to cancer cells. However, when we used 3 cells which contained chemotherapeutic agents, CDDP, TAM, and TAXOL, comparing with MDA-MB231, MC-7 cells were relatively showing resistance to CDDP treatment and sensitive to TAM treatment.

In order to find out enhancing cytotoxicity by combining with fucoidan and chemotherapeutic agents, we tried in the presence of 400 µg/mL of fucoidan with CDDP and then found that over 80% cell growth inhibition was induced by 10 µg CDDP in both MDA-MB231 and MC-7 cells.

In other words, fucoidan itself can induce apoptosis and proliferation toward cancer cells. However, by using chemotherapeutic agents with fucoidan, 80% of breast cancer cells growth would be suppressed.

I would also like to show that by using fucoidan and chemotherapeutic agents together, how apoptosis and proliferation will be induced. The researchers found that 200 μg/mL FE enhanced 5 μM CDDP-induced apoptosis from 32.9% to 52.4% in MDA-MB-231 cells and from 20.4% to 47.6% in MCF-7 cells. Combining FE with TAM (10 μM) enhanced cell death from 17.9% to 57.9% in MDA-MB-231 cells and from 31% to 66% in MCF-7 cells after 48 h of treatment. Apoptotic cell death increased about two-fold over 48 h in the presence of both FE and TAXOL (2.5 nM) relative to TAXOL alone in both MDA-MB-231 cells and MCF-7 cells. As a result, it was confirmed that there was an increase in the number of destruction of cancer cells when chemotherapeutic agents were used along with fucoidan instead of fucoidan alone.