Cytotoxic and apoptotic effect of citrus flavonoid naringin in treating pa-1 ovarian cancer cells

Ovarian cancer is one of the leading deadliest cancers among women and new therapeutic options with lesser side effects are in urgent need. Naringin is a citrus flavonoid recently studied for anti-cancer activity in numerous cancer cells. Evasion of apoptosis is the hallmark of cancer and therefore we investigated the potential of naringin to induce anti-proliferative and apoptotic effects in PA-1 ovarian cancer cells. Trypan blue assay and Western blotting techniques were employed on the treated and untreated PA-1 cells for anti-proliferative and apoptosis analysis. Naringin effectively reduced viability of PA-1 cell line. Immunoblot analysis revealed marked changes in the upregulation of pro-apoptotic markers like Bax and Caspase-3 along with downregulation of anti-apoptotic marker Bcl-2. Taken together, our results suggest that treating naringin may offer a new therapeutic strategy to improve the survival rates of ovarian cancer patients.