Salicin a promising ER, PR and HER2 binding molecule proving lethal against Hormone + and triple negative breast cancer cells

Abstract

Therapeutics against breast cancer is a major research field, due to inefficiency or partial efficiency of existing therapeutics.  An urge to discover better therapeutics always persists. Our objective is to study salicin against breast cancer cells, in order to find its therapeutic properties. To study the effect of salicin on breast cancer cells, we performed MTT assay on MCF-7 (hormone positive) and MDA-MB-231 (triple negative) breast cancer cell lines, we did brine shrimp lethality test (BSLT) assay to see the lethal effects of salicin. By the help of bioinformatics we tried to locate the targets that delineate salicin activity. Salicin was docked with estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR) and Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) to study its binding efficiency and possible targets of salicin. Salicin remarkably reduces cell viability both in MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231, along with being lethal to brine shrimps. These results together opine that salicin can be an effective therapeutics against breast cancer cells. The mechanism of action of salicin is probably through ER, PR and HER2 receptors because it can efficiently bind these receptors with minimum energy required for binding. This explains that salicin can easily bind to these receptors. These results together opine that salicin can be an effective therapeutics against breast cancer cells. The mechanism of action of salicin is probably through ER, PR and HER2 receptors because it can efficiently bind these receptors with minimum binding energy. ER, PR and HER2 are major reasons behind the disease pathogenicity depending on the type of breast cancer. According to our results salicin may either induce apoptosis or reduce cellular mitosis both via P53 dependent and independent pathway, which makes salicin a good choice of both hormone positive and negative breast cancer cells.