Emerging role of berbamine as an anti-cancer agent in systemic malignancies besides chronic myeloid leukemia.

For the Letter to the Editor “Emerging role of berbamine as an anti-cancer agent in systemic malignancies besides chronic myeloid leukemia”, we are pleased with the interest in our article (Liang et al., 2011), and appreciate the insightful comments made by Dr. Kapoor (2012). He systemically reviewed application of berbamine as an anti-cancer agent during the past few years and found that berbamine also shows anti-cancer activity for other systemic malignancies besides chronic myeloid leukemia. Extensive scrutiny of its molecular targets and mechanism of action in the past few decades has provided important insights. At the cellular level, berbamine exhibits significantly antiproliferative activity, inhibiting the proliferations of leukemia, lymphoma (Du et al., 2010), breast cancer (Liu et al., 2010), and hepatocellular carcinoma (Wang et al., 2009). At the molecular level, berbamine-mediated anti-tumor activity was shown to be involved in PI3K/Akt, nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-κB) (Du et al., 2010), Fas-mediated apoptosis (Wang et al., 2009), and P-glycoprotein (Liu et al., 2010). However, its targets and molecular mechanism of action are still largely elusive. We feel that identification of the direct molecular target of berbamine will account for the diverse biological activities.