Reversal effects of two new milbemycin compounds on multidrug resistance in MCF-7/adr cells in vitro

Development of agents to overcome multidrug resistance (MDR) is important in cancer chemotherapy, and the overexpression of P-glycoprotein (P-gp) is one of the major mechanisms of MDR. In this paper, we evaluated the effects of two new milbemycin compounds, milbemycin β14 and secomilbemycin D, isolated from fermentation broth of S. bingchenggensis on reversing MDR of adriamycin-resistant human breast carcinoma (MCF-7/adr) cells. We observed that the both milbemycins (5 μM) showed strong potency to increase adriamycin cytotoxicity toward MCF-7/adr cells with reversal fold (RF) of 13.5 and 10.59, respectively. In addition, the mechanisms of milbemycins on reversing P-gp-mediated MDR demonstrated that they significantly increased the accumulations of adriamycin and Rh123 via inhibiting P-gp efflux in MCF-7/adr cells. Furthermore, the results also revealed that milbemycin β14 and secomilbemycin D could regulate down the expression of P-gp, but not affect the expression of MDR1 gene. In conclusion, our observations suggest that the two new milbemycin compounds probably represent the promising agents for reversing MDR in cancer therapy.