Investigation of the long-term cytotoxic effect of bee venom onliver and metastatic breast cancer cells

Bee venom is an alternative medicine product that contain biologically active molecules (such as melittin, apamine, adolapine, enzymes) produced by bees used in the treatment of many diseases. The problem of currently used cancer therapeutics is that drugs are not selective for cancer cells as to they can damage healthy cells and cause recurrence of cancer. Ideal cancer treatment can be provided by the agents with high selectivity that should target only cancer cells. It has been found in the literature that cytotoxicity is induced by bee venom in cancer cell lines and bee venom has minimal toxic effect on normal cells. In this thesis, it was aimed that to clarify of selectivity of bee venom in cancer therapy investigating in long-term and to reveal molecular mechanism of bee venom on breast (MDAMB-231), liver (HEPG2) cancer cells and normal fibroblast NIH/3T3 cell lines. It was found that bee venom was able to induce cell death in cancer cells, but less effective in healthy cells, and also showed persistent cytotoxic effect even if after removal bee venom. In this study, it was found that bee venom has a specific and selective effect on mitochondrial copy number variation, DNA damage and the location of a cytoskeleton protein in MDA-MB-231 and HEPG2 cancer cells. Key Words: Bee venom, Cisplatin, MDA-MB-231, HEPG2, NIH/3T3, Selectivity in cancer