The effect of thymoquinone and genistein treatment on telomerase activity and apoptosis in thyroid cancer cell lines

There are two main problems of today?s cancer treatment: a- cancer drugs have toxic effects on normal cells, and b- cancer stem cells are resistant to current treatments. Therefore, to investigate the molecular mechanisms of tumor, which include treatment-resistant cancer stem cells, that induce high selectivity and efficiency to cancer cell apoptosis, and also inhibit telomerase and angiogenesis in cancer, and this study was aimed a preliminary analysis to develop treatments and drugs with minimally toxic effects on normal cells.Anaplastic and follicular thyroid cancers are malignant tumours. It has been reported that anaplastic thyroid cancer cells were developed from the stem cells. After individual and combined dose applications of Thymoquinone and Genistein medicinal plants, which showed to be minimally toxic effects, we investigated the effects of these drugs on telomerase activity, angiogenesis and apoptosis as compared in anaplastic (CAL-62) and follicular (CGTH-W1) thyroid cancer cell lines. mRNA levels of hTERT, PTEN, NF-kB, p21 and VEGF-A genes and an active caspase-3 protein level have been measured in our study. We conducted MTT assay to determine cell viability, and than Real-Time PCR method was used for the analysis of mRNA. In addition, Kaspas-3 Sandwich Elisa kit was used to determine the levels of active caspase-3 protein.Our findings demonstrated for the first-time that especially the combined dose application of Thymoquinone and Genistein resulted in statistically high level of apoptosis induction and inhibition of telomerase and angiogenesis in thyroid cancer cell lines. In addition, our results also showed that thyroid cancer stem cells is more sensitive to the effects of Thymoquinone and Genistein treatment as compared thyroid cancer cell lines which of both cancer stem cell and non-cancer stem cell.Finally, these data indicated that the combined use of Thymoquinone and Genistein can be good choice of potential chemotherapeutic agents in the management of thyroid tumours.