Introduction: Pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal cancers worldwide. Poor prognosis and therapeutic resistance is known major barriers to survival of pancreatic cancer patients. Currently, the most common types of cancer treatment are surgery, chemotherapy, immunotherapy and radiotherapy. Off-target effects, toxicity effects on normal cells, and the formation and development of drug resistance are the major limitations on effectiveness of current therapies options. Stem cells have unique features including differentiation into other cell types, simple isolation, secretion of bioactive factors, and low immunogenicity. The niche of stem cells contains secreting products such as cytokines, growth factors, chemokines, bioactive lipids, and microRNA (miRNA) that maintain homeostasis in an autocrine/paracrine-manner. Currently, stem cells and their secretomes for repairing or replacement of damaged tissues or diseased organs seem to be beneficial. Among different types of stem cells, mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) exhibit characteristic favorable for tissue regeneration in paracrine manner. Also, stem cell-base anticancer therapy is recently established. Due to drug resistance in cancer therapy and toxicities effects of anticancer agents on normal cells, researchers are always interested to find novel, safe and more effective strategies to design anticancer drugs. Therefore, stem cells approach will be considered as a potential opportunity. Autophagy is a process where cellular components such as macro proteins or even whole organelles are sequestered into lysosomes for degradation. The study of molecular events associated with MSC/tumor cell interactions would be essential for identifying the role(s) of stem cells to suppress or induce the key signaling pathways of tumor cells and it will be critical to design therapeutic approaches.
Methods: Herein, we are interested to evaluate the therapeutic effects of human amniotic mesenchymal stromal cells (hAMSCs) on pancreatic cancer cells, Panc1, in co-culture manner through induction of autophagy pathway
Results: In this regard, hAMSCs and Panc1 cells were co-cultured by using the trans-well membranes. Total cell lysates of cells were prepared and analyzed by using western blot. Our results can be critical to find new anticancer therapy platforms depend on paracrine manner particularly in pancreatic cancers.
Conclusion: In this study, we found that activation of autophagy pathway by hAMSCs secretome is a potential platform in cancer therapy. Also, it can be useful to find more information about interaction between stem cells and cancer cells to extract effective and novel components from stem cells.
Keywords: Stem cells; Pancreatic cancer cells; Autophagy