Curcumin Induces Apoptosis in SGC-7901 Gastric Adenocarcinoma Cells via Mitochondrial Signaling

Gastric carcinoma (GC) remains the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide (Huang et al., 2013). According to the statistics, the 5-year relative survival rate of gastric cancer patients is 24.3% (Shin et al., 2012). Only 20% of the patients are suitable for curative resection because the majority of diagnosed patients are locally advanced or metastatic (Ajani et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2013; Li et al., 2014). Chemotherapy is the main adjuvant treatment for postoperative and advanced gastric cancer therapy. Currently, platinum, 5-fuorouracil (5-FU), and taxanes are recommended as the first-line chemotherapy for the treatment of gastric cancer (Chen et al., 2013). However, the response rate of drug chemotherapy remains lower than 20% and the chemotherapeutics sometimes lead to severe toxicity at their therapeutic dose (Lorenzen et al., 2013). Therefore, to discover the effective and novel chemotherapy is requisite. Curcumin (1, 7-bis-(4-hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-1, 6-heptadiene-3, 5-dione), derived from the rhizome of the plant Curcuma longa L, has been used for thousands of years in Asia countries as a food additive, cosmetic, and as a traditional herbal medicine (Jiang et al., 2014; Shoji et al., 2014). Recently, amount of studies have