Lei Wang, Haijun Zhang, Baoan Chen, Guohua Xia, Shuai Wang, Jian Cheng, Zeye Shao, Chong Gao, Wen Bao, Liang Tian, Yanyan Ren, Peipei Xu, Xiaohui Cai, Ran Liu, Xuemei Wang

Traditional Chinese medicine is gradually becoming a new source of anticancer drugs. One such example is wogonin, which is cytotoxic to various cancer cell lines in vitro. However, due to its low water solubility, wogonin is restricted to clinical administration. Recently, the application of drug-coated magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) to increase water solubility of the drug and to enhance its chemotherapeutic efficiency has attracted much attention. In this study, wogonin was conjugated with the drug delivery system of MNPs by mechanical absorption polymerization to fabricate wogonin-loaded MNPs. It was demonstrated that MNPs could strengthen wogonin-induced cell inhibition, apoptosis, and cell cycle arrest in Raji cells by methylthiazol tetrazolium assay, flow cytometer assay, and nuclear 4',6-diamidino-2-phenylindole staining. Furthermore, the molecular mechanisms of these phenomena were explored by western blot, in which the protein levels of caspase 8 and caspase 3 were increased significantly while those of survivin and cyclin E were decreased significantly in wogonin-MNPs group. These findings suggest that the combination of wogonin and MNPs provides a promising strategy for lymphoma therapy.