Degraded by the proteasome and treatment of HeLa cells with MG-132 resulted in accumulation of t-Bid and sensitized the cells to death receptor-induced apoptosis. Also Bik and Bim were found to be upregulated following PI treatment and cells deficient for both or cells in which Bik and Bim were down regulated by RNA interference were refractory to its cytotoxic action. Likewise, different PIs Endoxifen (E-isomer hydrochloride) biological activity including bortezomib and MG-132 were shown to induce expression of Noxa in several tumor models both at the protein and mRNA level and siRNA-mediated knockdown of Noxa partially rescued various tumor cells from PI-induced apoptosis. Expression of other Bcl-2 family members such as Puma, Bax, Bak, Bcl-2, and Bcl-XL remained mostly unaffected following treatment of different cell lines with PIs. Several signaling pathways have been shown to play a role in PI-induced cytotoxicity including stabilization of the tumor suppressor protein p53, inhibition of the nuclear factor-kB, or induction of an ER-stress response. As Noxa was first identified as a p53 target gene, the stabilization and activation of p53 would have been an attractive possibility for apoptosis induction by PIs. However, PI-mediated tumor cell killing was also observed in p53-deficient cells and independently of NF-kB inhibition suggesting that other signaling pathways targeted by the proteasome are even more crucial for cell death induction by PIs. One of those might be instigated by members of the mitogen-activated protein kinase family, the c-Jun N-terminal kinases that were MCE Chemical AZD-6244 reproducibly found to be activated in PI-treated cells. More intriguingly, inhibition of JNK activity by either dominant-negative JNKs or by RNA interference rendered the cells resistant toward cell death induction by PIs. Thus, it appears that JNKs, in addition to several other pathways in which they were shown to contribute to apoptosis signaling, are also crucial players in PI-induced apoptosis. Three JNK isoforms with different splice variants are expressed either ubiquitously or preferentially in neuronal and heart tissues. They were originally identified by their ability to specifically phosphorylate and activate c-Jun, a constituent of the activator protein-1 transcription factor that is involved in the increased expression of
