INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES: Algae have revealed to be one of the major sources of new compounds with antifungal, antibacterial, antiviral, and antitumor potential. These organisms are easy to cultivate, and this property can benefit medicine since we could scale the production. Cancer is the second leading cause of death, being the skin cancer the most common type of cancer in the world. For 2025 is estimated 1.77M of cases of skin cancer worldwide, in Brazil the skin cancer corresponds to 27% of all malignant tumors in the country. The aim of this study is to analyze the anticancer potential of the compound C obtained from a green alga against skin cancer. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The compound C was solubilized in dimethyl sulfoxide and increasing concentrations were used in MTT assay with cancer cell lines, B16F10 (melanoma) A431(non-melanoma); for the healthy cell lines NIH3T3 (fibroblast) and HaCaT (keratinocytes) were used the maximum concentration and IC50 for the treatment. The cells were incubated with the compound at different concentrations maintained for 48h in 5% CO2 at 37°C. The control condition consisted of cells cultured with the compound dilution vehicle (0.5% DMSO). The percent viability calculation was performed from the ratio: [(A570nm of treated cells/A570nm of untreated cells)x100]. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The preliminary results showed that compound C induced a significant mitochondrial activity reduction in both cancer cell lines, with IC50=50μM in B16F10 and IC50=130μM in A431. The compound C didn´t have effect in the NIH3T3 cells in the IC50, but in the HaCaT it showed to be cytotoxic. The Compound C demonstrated to be an interesting source to the development of a new anticancer drug to the treatment of melanoma and non-melanoma cancer.
Keywords: Anticancer, Melanoma, Non-melanoma, Green Algae, Marine Natural Products.
Supported by: CAPES, CNPq, FAPERJ, Marinha do Brasil.