Abstract

The varying rates of Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) incidence and mortality rates between genders highlight a critical need to understand how β-Estradiol (βEst) affects HCC cell lines. In order to reveal this, the proliferative and migratory characteristics and the protein expressions of the Akt-Sox9 pathway were evaluated in βEst-treated HepG2 HCC cells in vitro. Cell viability and cell migration characteristics, IL-6 levels measurement by ELISA, and Akt and Sox9 protein expression level measurement by Western blotting were performed in βEst-treated HepG2 cells. Results: In βEst-treated cells, migration rate (%/h) and overall migration rate (µm/h) were lowered to 0.5 and 2.6, respectively, and IL-6 levels were reduced to about 40 percent of that of control cells. In addition, the relative protein expression level of Akt (0.88-fold) and Sox9 (0.64-fold) was found to be downregulated following βEst treatment. According to the results of our in vitro study, HepG2 cell behaves as potentially hormone-responsive cells, and the results also support the clinical study findings about gender disparity in HCC.

Key words: Hepatocellular carcinoma, gender, β-Estradiol, Akt, Sox9