Ligustrazine eases lung cancer by regulating PTEN and Wnt/β-catenin pathway

Lung cancer (LC) is the most common malignant tumor in the world, which causes over a million deaths per year (1,2). In recent years, the morbidity and mortality of LC have increased sharply (3). At present, surgery and chemotherapy are the primary treatment of LC, but there are still problems with drug resistance and easy recurrence (4-6). Over the past 10 years, the 5-year survival rate for patients with advanced LC has not exceeded 20%. With the development of targeted molecular biology, targeted therapy has become a promising method for the treatment of LC. Therefore, the search for new targeted drugs plays a key role in improving the survival rate of patients with advanced LC. Ligustrazine (LSZ), an alkaloid, is an active ingredient extracted from the Chinese herbal medicine Ligusticum chuanxiong Hort (7). Numerous studies have suggested that LSZ exhibits a variety of biological activities such as antidepression (8), anti-inflammatory (9), cardioprotective (10) anti-cancer (11,12), and neuroprotective (13). In recent years, pieces of evidence also indicated that LSZ exhibited potent anticancer effects in melanoma (14) and breast cancer (15). Zou et al. found that LSZ-based analogs Original Article