RESUMO
Background: Babao Dan (BBD) is a traditional Chinese medicine that has been widely used as a complementary and alternative medicine to treat chronic liver diseases. In this study, we aimed to observe the effect of BBD on the incidence of diethylnitrosamine (DEN)-initiated hepatocellular carcinoma formation in rats and explored its possible mechanism. Methods: To verify this hypothesis, BBD was administrated to rats at a dose of 0.5g/kg body weight per two days from the 9th to 12th week in HCC-induced by DEN. Liver injury biomarkers and hepatic inflammatory parameters were evaluated by histopathology as well as serum and hepatic content analysis. We applied immunohistochemical analysis to investigate the expression of CK-19 and SOX-9 in liver tissues. The expression of TLR4 was determined by immunohistochemical, RT-PCR, and western blot analysis. Furthermore, we also detected the efficacy of BBD against primary HPCs neoplastic transformation induced by LPS. Results: We observed that DEN could induce hepatocarcinogenesis, and BBD could obviously decrease the incidence. The biochemical and histopathological examination results confirmed that BBD could protect against liver injury and decrease inflammatory infiltration. Immunohistochemistry staining results showed that BBD could effectively inhibit the ductal reaction and the expression of TLR4. The results showed that BBD-serumcould obviously inhibit primary HPCs neoplastic transformation induced by regulating the TLR4/Ras/ERK signaling pathway. Conclusion: In summary, our results indicate that BBD has potential applications in the prevention and treatment of HCC, which may be related to its effect on hepatic progenitor cells malignant transformation via inhibiting the TLR4/Ras/ERK signaling pathway.
RESUMO
A simple HPLC method for the simultaneous determination of phenylglyoxylic acid (PGA), mandelic acid (MA), styrene glycol (SG) and hippuric acid (HA) in cell culture medium was developed. Analysis was performed on a C(18) column with a mobile phase composed of methanol-potassium dihydrogen phosphate (pH 2.5; 10 mM; 10:90, v/v) at 220 nm. The flow-rate of mobile phase was set at 0.5 mL/min. The mean absolute recoveries of PGA, MA, SG and HA were 95.9, 98.4, 98.0 and 97.1%, respectively. The inter-day and intra-day precisions, determined at three concentration levels, were less than 10% of RSD. The limits of quantification for PGA, MA, SG and HA were 13.2, 13.1, 14.5 and 11.2 microM with RSD less than 20%. The limits of detection for PGA, MA, SG and HA were 4.6, 4.6, 5.1 and 3.9 microM, respectively. The method was successfully applied to study the stereoselective metabolism of SG and MA in primary culture of rat hepatocytes. The results show that there is stereoselective metabolism for both of MA and SG in primary culture of rat hepatocytes. The extent of biotransformation from S-MA to PGA is significantly greater than that from the R enantiomer and the main metabolites are PGA and HA for S-SG and R-SG, respectively.
